The Crooked Man Director Tackled the Reboot Like He Was Adapting a Stephen King Novel

Third time’s the charm for the upcoming Hellboy reboot, Hellboy: The Crooked Man. Despite Guillermo del Toro’s adaptations (Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army) becoming cult favorites, attempts at adapting Mike Mignola’s beloved comic books to the big screen have failed to completely satisfy fans. As a result, director Brian Taylor is taking a new approach to bringing the acclaimed comic book character to life. While many comic book adaptations treat the source material as a rough guide, Taylor is treating Mignola’s ‘The Crooked Man’ run of Hellboy comics with as much respect as one would to a novel adaptation.

Brian Taylor recently sat down with GamesRadar+ about Hellboy: The Crooked Man. The director was asked about his approach to the franchise, and how he intended to differentiate his movie from the past adaptations. As well as Del Toro’s movies, David Harbor also starred as the red-skinned Devil in the critically panned 2019 reboot. Taylor said it partly came down to how he approached the source material. Referencing how Hollywood treats feature film adaptations of beloved novels, the director says he brought the same reverence and respect to Mignola’s comics as he would if he were adapting a Stephen King novel. He explained:

“I took to this like, ‘This is an adaptation. I’m adapting the story the way I would adapt a Stephen King story, it’s all there in the texts. I’m just gonna execute it with as much love and care as we can.’ I think fans of the original comic book are gonna love this. I know already like there’s people online who’ve seen the teasers and things like that and they’re like, ‘This is the comic.’ That’s what we want.”

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a ‘Folklore Story’

After being summoned to Earth by a demonic Nazi cult (Mike Mignola’s comics are wild!), Hellboy is taken in by the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. This concept leaves endless possibilities as to where Hellboy’s story could go. Guillermo Del Toro’s movies, and the 2019 reboot, pitted Hellboy and the Bureau against threats on a country and world-ending scale. For his 2024 adaptation, Brian Taylor is keeping his story grounded.

During the conversation, Taylor explained that his movie will have no connections to the past adaptations and will be a self-contained story. He expressed his issues with modern franchise movies, their increasingly growing runtimes, and needlessly complicated plots which require too much exposition. Taylor said his Hellboy reboot is a “beautiful folklore movie.”

“I knew we weren’t gonna be referential to the other films at all, they’re their own thing. They’re great but this is not a this is not a space opera, right? It’s a folklore story, it’s contained. It’s an attempt to make things a little simpler, I think. I kind of feel like movies have got really, really complicated. And we’re talking about this I mean, movies nowadays, it’s like two or three hours long and an hour of that people explaining things and I still don’t understand it. It makes me tired. I think a beautiful folk horror story is a simple thing, and that’s how we approached it.”

The first full trailer for Hellboy: The Crooked Man has shown off Jack Kesy’s cigar smoking demon. As well as giving audiences a better look at Kesy’s iteration of the iconic character, the trailer also shows off the film’s incredibly dark tone. Brian Taylor explained that, unlike past adaptations which took a more action-orientated approach, Hellboy: The Crooked Man is “a horror story, it’s a horror film – it’s very simple.”