Last week came the news that a live-action “Hellboy” reboot was in the works from Millennium Media. Titled “Hellboy: The Crooked Man,” the film has “Crank” co-director Brian Taylor attached to helm and will begin production in April in Bulgaria and Greece.
More excitingly, this will mark the first “Hellboy” film to boast a script by original creator Mike Mignola. The reports so far have all been second-hand, but now Taylor himself has gone on the record about the project and revealed more about his upcoming vision.
Speaking with Collider, Taylor says he would like his version to go a new direction and follow the darker Crooked Man story of the comics. That story sees Hellboy wandering around 1950s Appalachia where he gets pulled into a haunting case of witchcraft surrounding a man named Tom Ferrell and his deal with the local Devil, The Crooked Man.
Ferrell has returned to where he first became a witch in order to atone for his sins and teams up with Hellboy and a local witch named Cora to venture up the mountains to a church. Taylor says his take will be more of a dark folk lore version of the comic:
“I love the character of Hellboy and my favorite run of the character is this particular era. The GDT movies were massive scale space operas and just pure Del Toro through and through. But some of the comics Mike (Mignola) was doing at the time had a very different feeling. More lean and mean, creepy folk horror. A younger Hellboy, wandering the dark corners of the world… Paranormal investigator, night stalker…
The appeal of this one to me, is to go back to that and do a real reset, and really give us that version of Hellboy, which I just don’t think we’ve seen yet… we’re coming at this film, from a place of love for the original material, and for the character, for Mike’s character.
We’re not trying to reinvent some completely different idea of Hellboy – we’re trying to get back to the feeling of these particular books from the mid-aughts. It’s something that hasn’t been seen on screen before, but it’s a version I think hardcore Hellboy fans will want to see.”
Taylor says he’s doing all he can to keep it close to the original comic story, confirming Mignola and his “Baltimore” partner Christopher Golden’s script is where they’ve started and since then a lot of what I’m doing is trying to bring it even closer to the original comic book than what they did.” As it’s a darker book in the “Hellboy” canon it also means it’s fairly graphic in terms of horror and Millennium is all in on this take:
“I pitched an R-rated folk horror movie and the team here at Millennium have been nothing but supportive. It’s a great group of people, and they love horror.
We’ve definitely had a discussion of, you know, it doesn’t really serve anybody to make something R for R’s sake. To say it has to be R so we have to add A, B and C. But this material, this original material is dark and scary and violent and adult. So in order to really embrace that, we just don’t wanna have any handcuffs on.”
One change is that while the story will have three leads, the third won’t be the ‘Cora’ character – rather a new character that Mike created for the film version “that is gonna be a surprise”. Casting announcements will be soon.
