Yana Blajeva/Millennium Media/Ketchup Entertainment
"Hellboy: The Crooked Man" faithfully adapts the comic of the same name by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben, complete with a disgusting skin suit scene.
Director Brian Taylor told Business Insider that he used "a lot of rubber and a lot of lube" to get it right.
The film stars Jack Kesy as Hellboy, who investigates a community of witches in the Appalachian mountains in 1959 when he comes across a ghostly entity called the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale).
It's the second time Millennium Media has danced with Hellboy, after 2019's "Hellboy" starring David Harbour. But it was a critical failure and only earned $55 million against a $50 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo.
The reboot's most memorable scene is ripped right from the pages of the original story, as Hellboy stumbles onto the complete, empty skin of a human body. It belongs to a young witch named Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), and soon after Hellboy finds it, a raccoon scrambles through a window and climbs inside the skin.
It's revealed that Fisher used her powers to transform into a raccoon and is then forced to endure a bone-crunchingly painful process to regain her body.
When speaking to BI ahead of the film's release, director Brian Taylor explained that the raccoon is the only CGI element in the sequence — which was released online in full in August.
"So, obviously it's not a real raccoon, but with the exception of the raccoon, there's no CG enhancement whatsoever. Because when you read that in the comic book, it's one of those things where it's in the script and I know it's going to be a great moment… But you read it and you go, 'Okay, this is going to be a really bad CG scene.'" he explained.
"Or, we can try to build it so it becomes, 'Let's just do this Clive Barker style. Let's do it with a lot of rubber, and a lot of lube, and some really great performers,'" Taylor continued, referring to movies like "Hellraiser" and "Nightbreed."
"Even I, having gone through this edit a thousand times, shot by shot, can't spot the handoff. I can't spot the handoff where it turns from a physical effect to an actor. It's so seamless and there's no CG whatsoever. It's just performance and a lot of latex," he added.
The director also praised Margetson, saying: "At a certain point, the prosthetic, and the rubber, and the lube, and everything becomes a real person, which is Hannah Margetson, who's an incredible actor and just an out of this world physical performer."
The reliance on practical effects is a far cry from 2019's "Hellboy," which used heavy CGI for its over-the-top action scenes.
Instead, "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" takes a welcome, back-to-basics approach and leans closer to the horror genre than action and fantasy.
Icon Film Distribution presents "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" in UK cinemas from 27 September.
