Hellboy: The Crooked Man Director Teases R-Rated Reboot’s Horror Aspect

Hellboy: The Crooked Man director Brian Taylor has opened up about the upcoming R-rated reboot’s horror aspect, revealing that Stephen King was one of his inspirations for the movie.

What did Hellboy: The Crooked Man director say about the reboot?

During a recent interview, Taylor confirmed that Hellboy: The Crooked Man will indeed be a full-on horror story. This is very different from the tone and vibe of previous adaptations, including Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy movies and David Harbour’s Hellboy reboot, which leaned more into the character’s magical and fantastical aspects.

“It’s a horror story, it’s a horror film — it’s very simple,” Taylor said (via GamesRadar+). “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.”

He added, “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.”

The Crooked Man is directed by Brian Taylor (Crank) from a screenplay written by Hellboy comic book creator Mike Mignola and Chris Golden. The reboot stars Jack Kesy, Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Joseph Marcell, Leah McNamara, Hannah Margetson, and Martin Bassindale, with Kesy portraying the new live-action version of the titular anti-hero. The character was formerly portrayed by Ron Perlman in the Guillermo del Toro adaptation and David Harbour in the 2019 reboot.