Different Hellboys come and go, but there will always be things that go bump in the night — and who better to defeat them than the lovable red superhero? Later this year, actor Jack Kesy (12 Strong) will be the third actor to play Mike Mignola's Hellboy on the big screen, and you can see him in action in the first trailer for Hellboy: The Crooked Man above.
The trailer opens with scenic shots of the trees, rocks, and hills of Appalachia. But it quickly becomes clear that something is deeply wrong here. “Smells like death,” Kesy’s Hellboy proclaims. As the trailer proceeds, we see a levitating woman bitten by a snake, plagues of bugs, and other horrific sights.
Based on the comic-book miniseries of the same name by Mignola and artist Richard Corben, Hellboy: The Crooked Man is set in the 1950s and costars Adeline Rudolph (Resident Evil) as a rookie agent of the BPRD (the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) who teams up with Hellboy to protect the residents of Appalachia from the creepy Crooked Man, who is collecting souls for the devil.
In the lore, Hellboy was discovered as an infant demon by BPRD founder Professor Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm and raised to defend humanity from monsters less enlightened than himself. Over the course of his unnaturally long lifespan, Hellboy often teams up with the BPRD to solve paranormal mysteries and beat up demons.
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In addition to Kesy and Rudolph, the cast of Hellboy: The Crooked Man also includes Jefferson White (Yellowstone) as Tom Ferrel, Leah McNamara as Effie Kolb, Joseph Marcell as Reverend Watts, Hannah Margetson as Cora Fisher, and Martin Bassindale as the Crooked Man, among others.
The new film was co-written by Mignola (the creator of Hellboy, who has written almost every comic bearing his name and drawn many of them, too) and Christopher Golden (who has worked with Mignola before on Hellboy-adjacent comics). It is directed by Brian Taylor (Crank) and was shot on location in Bulgaria from March to May 2023.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man marks the first Hellboy film since 2019's self-titled reboot starring David Harbour. The first two Hellboy films were directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starred Ron Perlman in the title role. Those films were critically acclaimed (in 2018, former Entertainment Weekly writer Darren Franich called Hellboy II: The Golden Army one of the best superhero movies of the 21st century) but focused more on fantasy than horror and used Mignola’s comics more as a jumping-off point. Since then, subsequent Hellboy films have stuck closer to the source material.
Over the decades, Mignola's Hellboy comics have featured long-term epic sagas and self-contained short stories. The 2019 Hellboy film with Harbour went the epic route, tackling the character's destiny and relationship to mythical figures like Baba Yaga, and this one is swinging in the other direction by tackling one of the shorter stories.