Del Toro wanted Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann), the vampire king, to have cracked, white-blue skin,
• MSZ: So then we come to this illustration [opposite] of Damaskinos, the vampire king.
GDT: The idea here with Damaskinos was an exploration in color. Back then, I wanted to evoke a guy that looks like he’s from a Bruegel painting—like an aristocrat from the Renaissance. And the idea of the skin being made of cracked white-blue marble? Like, see the striations of the marble? It’s a demonstration of how old he is, and it comes from Cronos. I tried it first in Cronos, but the makeup was not good enough. And I tried it again here, and guess what? The makeup was not good enough again. I tried it yet again in Hellboy II with Prince Nuada. I think that came out decent. It was not marble by then; it was ivory. I’m bound to try it again.
MSZ: And then there’s a halo, almost like a saint.
GDT: I was trying to evoke wall portraiture, so I wrote some fake Latin, too. Completely fake.
MSZ: And the notes you have along the periphery about 1930s motion detectors, a body that twitches and then appears to come alive, but that is really covered with squids. What was that for?
GDT: Well, that is all in Mountains. In a way. Not all of it, but some of it. The 1930s motion detectors are a good idea. [laughs]
An idea he had been toying with since Cronos.
NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 33 B
– Cannibalistic squids in the whole torso of a victim. Animals are a part of a cave’s texture (walls).
– They see the body twitch and the think: ALIVE!!… but when they turn it, it’s covered with “squids”
– 1930’s motion detectors for the ice—
It is both sad, sad and very apparent that in this, the “age of communication” no one calls.
– Dead animals in a circle
– Under the ice chase w/ gun to take a breath
– In Hellboy, we’ll use grays, blues, greens, etc., and except for Chinatown, things Nazi, and Hellboy himself, we won’t use reds
– Diagonal beams “a la” Piranesi.
– A man is dismembering a corpse. Someone knocks at the door. He wants to speak with the man’s wife to sell her a vacuum cleaner. NOT TODAY. NOT A GOOD DAY. DAMASKINOS ON THE BLADE II POST 1/21/02.
HELLBOY
Page from Rasputin’s journal by Mike Mignola.
Storyboard panel of Sammael by Simeon Wilkins.
Drawing of Hellboy by Mike Mignola given to del Toro when wrapping Hellboy preproduction.
Sculpture depicting Hellboy’s confrontation with the Behemoth.
Rasputin (Karel Roden), flanked by Ilsa (Biddy Hodson) and Kroenen (Ladislav Beran).
Storyboard panel of Abe Sapien by Simeon Wilkins.
Concept of a young Hellboy by Wayne Barlowe.
Sammael sculpture by Spectral Motion.
“AT ONE POINT, I was going to do Mimic, and Jim Cameron said, ‘Aren’t you afraid people will pigeonhole you as a horror director?’” Guillermo recalls. “I said, ‘I’d love that!’”
Artist and writer Mike Mignola—the creator of the Hellboy comic book series—is a kindred spirit, someone who happily let his passion for horror tropes define his place in the world of comic books. “I’ve just always liked monsters,” Mignola said in a 2012 podcast interview with Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Since I was a little kid, it was always the thing I found interesting. It’s always what I wanted to draw. It’s always what I wanted to read.”
In the same interview, Mignola recalled how he came up with the comic’s eponymous character. “I’d made some noise about creating my own comic. I’d been working for Marvel and DC for ten years, had done a little bit of everything…. The more I thought about it, the more I really wanted to draw just what I wanted to draw, and the only name I’d ever come up with was Hellboy.”
Mignola added, “For whatever reason, the comic… appealed to a broader audience maybe than a lot of the regular comics I was doing. And then certainly you’ve got to give a lot of credit to the movie. I got really lucky that a very, very talented director happened to be a fan of the comic.”
Harlan Ellison has said that everything a writer writes, whether fiction or nonfiction, is ultimately autobiography, and this is certainly true of Guillermo’s approach to writing and filmmaking. The reason he was drawn to Hellboy was that he saw himself in this ungainly, unlikely superhero, this extraordinary outsider, this child-man striving to find a place for himself in a world ill-suited to his dimensions and diversions. Not for Guillermo were Batman or Superman, those oddballs who nevertheless so successfully imitate normal men. Hellboy, on the other hand, someone who lacks that ability, was a perfect fit.
From the start, Guillermo brought Mignola in to work closely with him on the movie’s design and story elements, but nonetheless Guillermo felt free to deviate from Mignola’s comic book to explore issues that were personally important. “Even though they both arrived on Earth in the forties, somehow del Toro’s Hellboy is still a lovesick teenager,” Mignola explains. “My Hellboy is modeled on my father in some way, a guy who’s been in the Korean War, and he’s traveled and he’s done a lot of stuff, and he’s kind of got a ‘been there, done that’ attitude. He’s been in the world. And del Toro’s change was to have Hellboy bottled up in a room and mooning over the girl he can’t have. My Hellboy, there were just no girl problems. That element of the character was completely not in the comic.”
As with Blade II, Guillermo realized that he wanted to craft a film that would appeal to a particular aspect of himself: the eight-year-old boy inside. That meant that Hellboy would be excessive, he explains, “in the way that a gold-leaf-covered Baroque church in Mexico is excessive. The whole statement is excess. And if you know me, and you know my life, and you know my house, I’m not exactly going for the Zen stuff. So the two Hellboys are very excessive.”
Hellboy’s excessiveness extended in particular to the color palette, with no apologies. Visually, Guillermo notes, “the films I’m the proudest of are the Hellboys, because I don’t care if people like them or not, I just think they are absolutely beautiful to look at.”