“There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.” – 17th Century nursery rhyme
Set against the eerie backdrop of the 1950s Appalachian Mountains, Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024) stands as a tonal departure from previous cinematic interpretations of the iconic half-demon hero. Directed by Brian Taylor and co-written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, this iteration marks a significant evolution from earlier portrayals as the character emerges not just as a brash supernatural fighter but as a seasoned and introspective figure. Notably, this folk horror adaptation delves into a darker, more grounded narrative in which Hellboy navigates a haunted community plagued by haints, witches, and the sinister “Crooked Man.” The Appalachian region’s unsettling folklore provides a perfect backdrop for Hellboy’s struggle with his own demonic heritage, as anyone versed in the volumes of “Old Hag” and “Old Scratch” tales can verify. Here, Hellboy’s filmic journey reflects an emotional advancement from the impulsive, wisecracking demon audiences have seen before; whereas in earlier films, Hellboy appears to have the maturity level of a rebellious teenager, The Crooked Man’s representation is a more contemplative personality whose strength is matched by a deeper understanding of his role as a protector against paranormal threats. Practially, The Crooked Man is the first Hellboy film that gives those most familiar with Mignola’s work a bona fide cinematic version of the Hellboy they know and love, even if it does mostly come across similarly to that of a “Monster of the Week” episode.
In Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), director Guillermo Del Toro builds a warm cinematic universe in which Hellboy is seen as a sympathetic character, softening the edges of the comics with romanticism and existential melancholy. Ron Perlman portrays the half-demon as a loner who craves connection, essentially a teen emo romantic, vulnerable underneath his tough exterior. Del Toro, never abandoning his style, transforms Mignola’s work into a gothic fairy tale, softening the source material’s brawny darkness. Hellboy seems unserious in these first two films; sure, he’s waded through some wild stuff, but that still hasn’t given him effective life experience. It’s not that Hellboy is wet-behind-the-ears, but despite knowing what he has to do, he hates it, rejects it, and rebels against it. In Hellboy II, the character Johan, who is a ghost made visible by existing inside a kind of man-shaped, steampunk-looking, old-time heavy glass diving suit, tells Hellboy he can’t take criticism. Instead of reflecting on that, Hellboy clobbers the guy and lets all his ectoplasm escape his suit. “Your temper makes you sloppy,” Johan says, “try to control it before it controls you.” Hellboy calls him a “glasshole.”
Even though Hellboy may be a cantankerous loner, he engulfs himself in his sense of family; Del Toro pushes heavily the themes of found family–or, in correct English, “fambly.” Which is true: the BPRD’s misfits forge a deep bond, loving and supporting each other through their shared outsider status. However, the cinematic representation is still bogged down by Del Toro’s personal obsessions. The heroic monster misunderstood by shocked citizens. Old world dark academia. Interspecies sex. The romance between monster Hellboy and human Liz in the first two films easily becomes a slog, especially if one takes into consideration: is a demon supposed to experience love? Hellboy may be a special case in light of his half-humanity, but certainly it’s not his demonic side that craves affection. (So this could be the audience’s existential crisis.) Regardless, Del Toro is too much of a romantic and can’t escape his intense sympathies towards actual, literal monsters. The Hellboy comics possess a specific sort of stoic, poetic masculinity, which Del Toro is just too soft to pull off completely.
Neil Marshall’s Hellboy (2019) is a tale much darker, angrier, and more volatile than audiences had seen previously. David Harbour takes the reins as the title character, portraying him as less endearing and more emotionally raw. Here, Hellboy constantly wrestles with his demonic heritage and, prone to anger, despair, and self-loathing, is less confident in his humanity. He feels alienated from both humans and monsters, making this version an edgy teenager lashing out at his dad most of the time. One of his biggest hissy fits is a fight with his adoptive father, Professor Bruttenholm, about why he was spared as a child and the regret he feels after the BPRD weaponized him with the sole purpose to “slaughter (his) brothers and sisters.” It’s there that the audience glimpses Hellboy’s first existential crisis: the false equivalency of witches and demons wanting to kill humans because humans want to kill witches and demons. Further down the line, we see the greater cause of that crisis is frustration with his role as a pawn in cosmic battles, struggling with prophecies that tie him to the Apocalypse. He feels pressure from both sides: the villianous Blood Queen antogonizes Hellboy with thoughts of him ruling Hell on Earth; on the heroic side, Hellboy struggles with learning he has an important role in Arthurian legend and contends with the newly given burden of extracting and using the mythical Excalibur to save the world.
Harbour’s Hellboy is less gallant and more self-destructive; brooding rather than introspective. Hellboy feels like a tragic anti-hero, caught in a world that rejects him on all sides, which he deals with on the day-to-day by drinking away his sorrows. With Marshall at the helm, Hellboy is closer to the comics’ darker tone but sacrifices Del Toro’s character-driven warmth for a more fragmented, plot-heavy narrative that overexemplifies violence. It’s a bit like Marshall tried to overcorrect too hard by turning our hero into a dude-bro drunk. Hellboy still has some growing up to do.
In Brian Taylor’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man, Hellboy is a more subdued, introspective figure. This version strips away the bombast of prior adaptations, presenting a Hellboy who’s quieter, more contemplative, and deeply tied to the comics’ folk horror roots. His humor is minimal, replaced by a world-weary stoicism. He’s less a superhero and more a paranormal investigator, making this film share more in common with a detective story than a gothic fantasy. Jack Kesy portrays Hellboy as if he’s a true outsider, not just because of his giant red demon guy appearance, but more inwardly evidenced by his ostensible disconnection from the world around him. Whereas previously Hellboy had been kept as a kind of Bigfoot-like secret by the powers that be, in this world he exists in a more established and publicly accepted way. So instead of being shocked and scared by him, the people are used to Hellboy and just let him do his job and be on his way. His interactions with allies are professional but distant, lacking the deep bonds of Del Toro’s films or even the tense camaraderie of Marshall’s. Even his relationship with his partner Bobbie Jo Song is more of a mentorship than a familial bond. He confronts supernatural threats with a focus on protecting the innocent, but his actions reflect a weary acceptance of his role rather than rebellion or angst. His demonic nature is acknowledged, but not a central conflict, which emphasizes his duty over personal turmoil. This is the Hellboy who acts most like a Hell Man.
So, as the most faithful adaptation of Mignola’s comics in style and tone, Taylor’s film is a lower-budget, less grand, atmospheric folk horror tale that fully captures the eerie, understated vibe of The Crooked Man comic arc. It prioritizes mood and mystery over action, with a lean narrative not bogged down by prophecies and romance. Hellboy feels like a mythic wanderer, less concerned with cosmic destinies and more with small-scale, human stories. This makes him feel closer to Mignola’s original vision but, to be fair, perhaps less dynamic than his cinematic predecessors.
“The crooked man, he smiled, in his crooked little way,
He tended to his garden where the crooked flowers swayed;
With his crooked cat and mouse, they danced beneath the moon,
In their little crooked house, they sang a crooked tune.”
In Mike Mignola’s 2008 comic miniseries Hellboy: The Crooked Man the nursery rhyme serves as a narrative anchor for a folk horror tale set in the isolated hollers of 1950s Appalachia. Here, the Crooked Man is reimagined not as a vague figure but as a vengeful demon born from colonial greed: Jeremiah Witkins, a ruthless 18th-century Scottish settler and war profiteer in Virginia’s “The Hurricane” region. Hanged for his crimes, Witkins claws back from Hell as a gaunt, umbrella-wielding ghoul sporting a tattered suit and fedora, his “crooked” form a twisted echo of the rhyme. He sustains himself by exploiting human despair, nagging and teasing at individuals’ guilt, collecting souls in glowing jars disguised as crooked sixpences, while recruiting witches as his coven to ensnare more victims.
The film amplifies the Crooked Man’s exploits by weaving in authentic Appalachian and Southern U.S. folklore, grounding the supernatural in the region’s rich oral traditions of hauntings, hexes, and mountain devils. Central to the story is the Crooked Man’s alliance with Effie Kolb, a hag-like witch who transforms desperate local women into her “riding sisters” by preying on their grief. This draws heavily from the boo hag legend of Gullah-Geechee folklore (rooted in African-American coastal Carolina and Georgia traditions, but echoed in Appalachian witch tales): skinless, red-fleshed crones who shed their human skins at night to “ride” victims, suffocating them in their sleep and leaving blue bruise marks. In the film, these witches climb from their flayed hides like slimy vermin, mounting possessed folk transformed into spectral horses and riding them “for show.” Effie Kolb’s arc is a blending of horror with the eerie realism of the poverty and isolation of the region, illuminating the desperation and vanity some poor, impoverished souls are so easily manipulated by.
“Ghosts and critters up here older than the Flood.”
“Dark things are drawn to dark things.” – Hellboy: The Crooked Man
The isolation is elemental to the formation of Appalachian folklore: the syncretism of Christian faith, magical practices, and diverse cultural influences coexisted, often without conflict, as a practical way to navigate life’s challenges in the remote mountain region. Appalachian folk are known to be deeply religious, with their faith rooted in Protestantism (namely, Baptist and Methodist traditions). God’s will was seen as directly influencing both the supernatural and human realms through divine intervention. This shaped a worldview where spiritual forces were ever-present and often intertwined with folk practices. An example is the women known as “granny witches,” healers who combined their Christian faith with folk magic. These women would use herbal remedies, charms, and rituals, believing wholeheartedly that their abilities were God-given. Practices like “laying on hands” or reciting Bible verses during healing rituals merged Christian spirituality with magical traditions. Tom Ferrell’s concern for his neighbor’s ill daughter is reminiscent of this. “No medicine doctor’s gonna do her a speck of good, son,” the mother hesitates. “She’s witched.” Tom then gives instructions to his neighbors on how to rid their daughter of the bewitching by repeating the witch’s name while boiling the young woman’s clothes.
From there, we can see how Appalachian folklore is also rich with superstitions, such as avoiding certain actions to ward off bad luck or using rituals to protect against evil spirits. These beliefs often coexisted with Christian practices, viewing the physical and spiritual worlds as interconnected. Native American, especially Cherokee traditions, contributed elements like herbal medicine and storytelling about supernatural beings. In the Crooked Man comic, Hellboy, Tom, and Cora must traverse through haunted ground that once housed active coal mines. “Melungeon witches,” descended from the settlers of Roanoke Island who mixed with Croatoan Indians, flocked to the coal mines after a cave-in, torturing the men trapped there and eating their flesh. Since then, the Melungeons, referred to as “a special kind of evil,” have stayed in the collapsed mines, tormenting any who passes through the territory. The only way Tom and Hellboy escape the horrific situation is by begrudged use of Tom’s “lucky bone,” a witch charm symbolizing his pained ties to the Crooked Man. Tom is repentant of his younger days when he let himself be tricked and manipulated by Effie Kolb into becoming a witch himself. While not outright speaking of forgiveness, this part of the story is deeply steeped in the Christian concept of “go and sin no more.” With the blending of Christian settler and Indigenous practices creating hybrid beliefs in omens and natural magic, the fusion transformed the Crooked Man nursery rhyme from a children’s verse into a portal for American Gothic folklore. Hence, solid ground laid for writers like Mignola.
Broader Appalachian elements infuse the atmosphere: the misty, eldritch mountains themselves act as a Lovecraftian entity, birthing familiars in the film like giant black birds in Hellboy’s visions of his mother (inspired by corvid omens in Scots-Irish settler lore) and spider-like demons that evoke Native American tales of shape-shifting, web-weaving tricksters. The narrative explores haints (restless mountain spirits) and the desecration of sacred ground, as the Crooked Man attempts to corrupt a local church by dredging up buried sins, a motif from Protestant folk Christianity where graveyards become battlegrounds for divine and infernal forces. The integration of faith and magic is evident when the Preacher is nonchalant about Cora Fisher first being a witch, then a ghost, inside the church, and then further solidified when the Holy Spirit is squeezed out of Tom’s lucky bone and used to power the Preacher’s ghoul-dispatching shovel.
The folklore-rich narrative directly supports that Hellboy has matured from a brash, impulsive demon into a reflective and resolute “Hell Man” by showcasing his emotional depth, moral conviction, and nuanced confrontation with his own demonic identity. The Crooked Man, a demon born from human greed, serves as a dark mirror to Hellboy’s own infernal nature; both are “crooked” outcasts, but one redeemed through duty, the other damned by extreme greed. His interactions with the desperate locals Tom Ferrell and Cora Fisher, and the witch Effie Kolb reveal a newfound empathy, as he grapples with their suffering and his own outsider status, a stark departure from the preceding Hellboys’ reckless defiance. Unlike earlier portrayals where Hellboy relied on quips and brute force, here he navigates the Appalachian folklore (boo hags, haints, cursed sixpences) with a somber, deliberate approach, reflecting a seasoned protector who understands the weight of his role.
By confronting the Crooked Man, a figure who exploits human despair, Hellboy rejects the temptation to embrace his demonic heritage for selfish power, instead choosing to safeguard a vulnerable community. This choice, set against the gritty backdrop of Appalachian oral traditions and the film’s intimate folk horror tone, underscores his transformation into a mature “Hell Man,” defined not just by strength but by wisdom, restraint, and a protector’s duty to confront evil, both external and within. Never you mind the timespan contradictions of the most mature characterization of Hellboy being in technically the earliest set film, though (1950s Appalachia vs Present Day, Modern World). Everyone knows time isn’t linear. ★
