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SDCC: Mike Mignola And Brian Taylor Talk Hellboy: The Crooked Man
Honouring Richard Corben’s Memory
Tripwire’s contributing writer Ernie Estrella spoke to Mike Mignola and director Brian Taylor about Hellboy: The Crooked Man coming to cinemas later this year…
The history of Hellboy in cinema is a storied one. Guillermo del Toro’s first Hellboy was a solid collaboration with creator Mike Mignola, but it was clear on the second film, whose vision they were making. The 2019 reboot starring David Harbour aligned better with its comic book DNA, but was a grindhouse film that lacked heart.
Films or series based on creator-owned properties deserve a faithful adaptation. If the original fans can’t recognize the IP, or hear the voice of the creators coming through, then why make it in the first place? Hellboy and Mignola deserve another chance, and on September 27, Hellboy: The Crooked Man will feature everyone’s favourite BPRD agent returning to his roots, in a simple, investigative horror story, based on Mignola’s favorite story in the Hellboy library. Tripwire was at Comic-Con International to talk to the cast and crew that was on hand to talk about the latest Hellboy movie.
Set in the late 1950s, The Crooked Man was originally published in 2008 and is a story about witchcraft unleashed in deep Appalachia. Hellboy encounters a man named Tom (Jefferson White) traveling home attempting to redeem his soul from the devil’s minion, the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale) who took it away 20 years ago. Tom and the Crooked Man struck a deal for a lucky cat bone, which kept him out of harm’s way, even in the war. The deeper they travel together, the more hair-raising the adventure.
Brian Taylor (Happy!) directs and the cast features fresh faces including Kesy (The Strain) in the titular role, Leah McNamara as Effie Kolb, Hannah Margetson as Cora Fisher, the great Joseph Marcell as Reverend Watts and Adeline Rudolph playing a new character, rookie Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense agent Bobbie Jo Sung. Also note, Mignola wrote the screenplay, which is the heart that pumps blood through this production.
When approached by the studio to write the screenplay, Mignola simply stated. “If you want me involved in any way, it’s got to be The Crooked Man. It’s my favorite Hellboy story and it has all the best elements. If you don’t want to do that, I won’t be involved.” Why so insistent? This was the fourth Hellboy film, who knows if there would be a fifth. Mignola wanted to see if he could get at least one made that was more faithful to the subject matter.
A NEW BUT FAMILIAR HELLBOY
Kesy realized after reading the dialogue that Hellboy was very close to his personality. “I like to chain smoke, I like to be a wise ass. This is gonna be good.” Comparisons to Ron Perlman and Harbour are inevitable, but Kesy trusted in the comic, the script and the collaborative spirit of Taylor, the prosthetics team and the VFX teams. “We tackled it, one page at a time.”
Kesy also connected with Hellboy’s “jadedness” of his job, which endeared him to the role. “He’s almost being summoned to do this field of work and he’s just so over it. I really love that. Getting up for some kind of work, we can all relate to that sometimes. He’s just a no-bullshit-kind-of-guy.”
PERFECT COLLABORATIONS
In many of the early Hellboy stories, Mignola handled both the art and writing, but on occasion, he would collaborate with Duncan Fregredo or Scott Hampton. But it was the stories where he was paired with the legendary late artist Richard Corben that had such a lasting punch to them. Mignola agrees.
“Richard was a legend, who I was so fortunate to work with,” Mignola reminisced. “When I was a kid, I never could have imagined I’d get to work with the guy. The Crooked Man was the first of many collaborations that were written specifically for Richard. It’s made of stuff that I knew Richard could draw better than anybody else. Better than I could. I could have done this story, but it wouldn’t have had that mood, that griminess, that really Earthy quality.”
“So I think I pulled out all the stops trying to impress Richard with the script I was writing for him and he delivered beyond anything I ever expected. I do think that it is what makes the perfect combination of my stuff and Richard’s material. I think that’s reflected in the film. It’s not just someone adapting me, it’s someone adapting the Corben-Mignola collaboration.”
That someone is Taylor and he understood that he is tasked at adapting a classic story by a master creator and the goal was to be as authentic as possible. He wasn’t brought on to do his take on Hellboy, “It’s Mike’s take.”
“When I came in, there was already a script by the creator, which was really exciting to me,” Taylor explained. “I knew we were going to do the real deal. This is not some studio reiteration. From the beginning, let’s keep this as true to the original source material and go to work.”
“It’s a folklore story, so we were making a folklore movie. It’s a movie with dark things in the woods, witches, and creepy cabins. There’s a lot of blank ink on that page, so there’s a lot of black ink on the screen. You try to light it and shoot it as moody and dark as the original book.”
“The story lets you know what it wants to be. Because this is an indie-grounded horror iteration of the character, you want to try to have more practical effects if you can because it feels good. You don’t need exotic purple monsters with 20 tentacles, you want real animals that could be in the woods but they’re just bigger or weirder.”
This is the closest Mignola has ever worked on a Hellboy film. Kesy said that Mignola talked to Taylor throughout principle photography and was watching the dailies. They share an affinity to Manly Wade Wellman, the Appalachian folklore author of the Silver Man, which inspired the Crooked Man story. So like the partnership with Corben, Mignola finally found a true collaborator in Taylor.
HOW THE F*** DO YOU DO THIS IN A MOVIE?
The strength of Mignola’s lured in the cast members, who then sought out the graphic novel to see what they’d be encountering. Corben’s art is so sick and twisted, which is why practical effects were needed to pull it off.
“The script is so faithful to the graphic novel, that everything is inherently informed by that,” White shared. “My character in the film is experiencing almost exactly what the character in the graphic novel experienced. Brian (Taylor) described Tom as a cat with a long tail in a room full of doors. In every direction things are coming to get Tom. Things are coming through every crevice at the edge of the frame to swallow him up. So he had to keep his head on a swivel. That was really easy because our set was so richly created. The performances were so vivid, my job was to stay open to everything around me, and stay aware of everything in the room. That did a lot of the work for me.”
“The key characters are the Crooked Man and Effie Kolb (McNamara), who is such an interesting contradiction in that book. [Effie] looks like a young woman but she’s an ancient evil witch. In the book there’s a lovely description of her flying away, floating. In the all the sequences, you see them on the page and you see them in the comic book and think, ‘how the f*** do you do this in the movie?
White would go on to explain two stunts that McNamara performed. One involved working with horses where she rides on the back of a horse with a wire harnessed to her body and strung to a tree. McNamara had to get off the horse, dance around the horse and then fly away. The other scene was another wire pull but this time it was off a tree branch.
“Leah was so amazing in being present and in the moment and so focused while all this other shit was going on,” the Yellowstone star continued. “That is an incredibly challenging thing to do with a live animal. They hate wires, boom poles, light stands, but all of her movements came out of the comic book. I wish that Leah and Martin were both here (at Comic-Con) because they really brought the movie to life. Both the Crooked Man and Effie Kolb were such vivid characters in the book, I’m excited for people to see those performances.”
Meanwhile, Bobbie Jo serves as the audience’s eyes. “A lot of what she goes through is the crossover between what’s in the textbook work and actually being out in the field and seeing the creatures,” explained Rudolph. “She’s a very studious character, very well-versed [in the paranormal], but finally sees things in real life for the first time. What was wonderful about this set is that so much of it was practical as opposed to CGI.” And that’s all informative for an actor and there’s almost an authenticity to the reactions towards the horrors and the built sets.
“There’s a sequence (when empty human skin is found on a bed) we’ll see in the panel that is horrific. I hope people think it’s horrific. I thought maybe they would do it in CGI but it’s all done in person. It is gruesome, it is grotesque, and it will send shivers down your spine. There’s a lot of elements that they brought to this movie that are off the page of the comics.”
Mignola said it best in the panel, “It’s finally a Hellboy horror film.”
Hellboy: The Crooked Man comes out in cinemas from 27 September.
Here is the film’s trailer too
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