Austin filmmaker brings the demon hunter back to the screen
By Richard Whittaker, 12:13 p.m., Tue., July 2, 2024
Austin-based filmmaker Brian Taylor has teamed up with comic book legend Mike Mignola to produce his greatest creation, Hellboyback to the screens with Hellboy – The Cursed Manand the first trailer is here.
The main roles in the new film are played by Jack Kesy (Deadpool 2) as Hellboy, the apparent son of Satan who rejected his birthright and joined the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense to fight evil.
The film adapts the three-part miniseries of the same name published by Dark Horse Comics in 2008, which depicts one of Hellboy’s first adventures as he and a young BPRD agent (Adeline Rudolph, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, resident Evil) head to Appalachia to take on a coven of witches led by the titular Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale, Master of the skies). The comic was written by Mignola and illustrated by Richard Corben, who is known for his work on Hellblazer, Heavy metaland the cover of Meatloaf’s Bat from HellThe comic is by Hellboy Fans consider it to be one of the greatest stories in the character’s 30-year history.
Hellboy – The Cursed Man Issue 1 of Dark Horse Comics. The three-part miniseries was adapted for the big screen by creator Mike Mignola, writer Christopher Golden, and filmmaker Brian Taylor. (Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics)
The director of this new film is Austin-based filmmaker Brian Taylor (crank, Crank: High voltage, mom and dad), who wrote the screenplay with Mignola and his long-time collaborator, writer Christopher Golden (Hellboy: The Lost Army, Red hands, Tell the stones of my sorrow).
Hellboy – The Cursed Man is the fourth film based on the character created by writer and artist Mignola in 1993. Moviegoers will probably be most familiar with his first foray onto the big screen, the 2004 film. Hellboy Director: Guillermo del Toro, sequel to 2008 Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Muted commercial success and creative differences between Mignola and del Toro caused plans for a third film to fail. In 2019, there was an attempt to reboot the franchise, with Stranger Thingss star David Harbour wears horns and trench coat forHellboybut although the film captured some of Mignola’s doom and gloom and contained some truly memorable moments that felt like they were in the comics – such as Hellboy’s trip to Baba Yaga’s house – it was rejected by fans of both the comics and the original films and was a commercial flop.
This new cinematic outing for everyone’s favorite purple demon hunter takes a radically different approach. For starters, all of the previous films revolved around the end of the world and epic forces bent on bringing about a magical catastrophe. The hunchbacked man is a much smaller story about witches, greed and murder, on a much smaller budget (reportedly $20-25 million), and there are plans that this could lead to a series of these stories on a smaller scale. With such a rich, established lore and hundreds of issues of Hellboy and spin-off comics, there is plenty of material for such future adventures.
Hellboy – The Cursed Man will be released later this year by Ketchup Entertainment and Millennium Media. Here’s the trailer…
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