Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s favorite monster movie is a universal horror classic

Mike Mignola’s influence is vast, from Henry James to Jack Kirby. In Art the Hellboy: Midnight Circus one-shot, one of Hellboy’s guardians takes the young demon to the library so he can learn to read something other than comics; it seems to be inspired by Mignola’s own love of reading.

“Dracula” is horror novel that most inspired Mignola, and in “Hellboy: Awaken the Devil” he thanks “Dracula and all those other vampires I loved.” “Hellboy: Conquering Worm” is named after a poem by Edgar Allan Poe (with lines from that poem included) and contains a similar tribute to old pulp heroes like Doc Savage and The Shadow.

“The Bride of Frankenstein” is Mignola’s favorite song a monster movie, but there’s another Boris Karloff horror film he likes even more: 1945’s The Body Snatcher. where Karloff plays an expressive and sinister grave robber instead of the bulky Creature.

Hellboy, as a character and comic, is the ultimate synthesis of everything Mignola loves. Sometimes referred to as a “paranormal investigator”, he has the attitude of Philip Marlowe, but deals in things outside of the occult. He is also (solely in the literal sense) a monster himself. Although people mostly accept Hellboy, they never can completely cross the bridge to become one of them – it looks a lot like Frankenstein’s monster and his quest for companionship.

Bride of Frankenstein differs from Shelley’s book, but does a better job of adapting the Monster’s tragic side. First, it includes sections of the book where the Monster tries to befriend a blind man, only to be chased away again by people who can see his appearance. Of course, the Creature desires the Bride because of his loneliness, and when she too recoils at the sight of him, he is in despair.

Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy films particularly emphasize Hellboy’s outsiderness. The director, a huge Frankenstein fan, who is making his own adaptation of Shelley’s book, clearly responded to and amplified the glimpses of isolation in Mignola’s Hellboy.

Played by Ron Perlman and drawn by Mignola, Hellboy has a thick jawline that rivals the square head of Karloff’s Creature. The difference is that Hellboy is expressive, not a killer; he gives children smiles and lollipops instead of drowning them. The creature decided to lash out at the world that rejected it. In many Hellboy stories, Hellboy is told by the monsters to start the apocalypse already, and he always tells them to fuck off, ripping off his own horns twice to show that he’s denying his fate. (Hellboy never wears horns that have grown to look more human.)

It helps that, unlike the Creature, Hellboy had a father who loved him: Professor Trevor “Broomstick” Bruttenholm. In the climactic miniseries, Hellboy: The Storm and the Fury Hellboy sees a sign that says “The End is Near” and feels solemn knowing that he was brought to Earth to bring about that end. So Hellboy remembers the moment from his childhood when the Broomstick assured him that he wasn’t Frankenstein’s monster:

Dark horse