Hellboy To Chop Off Heads, Bathe In Blood According To David Harbour

When the Hellboy reboot was initially announced, the character’s creator Mike Mignola promised that it would be an R-rated film. In a recent interview, new Hellboy star David Harbour mentioned seems to double-down on that promise, confirming a gruesome movie.

Speaking with Empire, Harbour mentioned that his character will end up chopping off plenty of heads and bathing in the blood of his enemies.

“There’s really a sense that you’re actually killing things, even if they are giants or monsters,” Harbour says. “You’re chopping their heads off, you’re bathing in their blood and you’re feeling the complex feelings of actually cutting the heart out of another thing. We’re taking the time to deal with the fact that Hellboy is a killer. He’s a weapon.”

In addition to being the cover story for Empire’s “Ultimate 2019 Preview Issue,” the British magazine also released a new still from the movie showing Harbour’s titular character speaking with his adoptive father Professor Bruttenholm, a character played by John Wick star Ian McShane.

Originally announcing the reboot via his Facbeook page last year, Mignola confirmed it’d be an R-rate reboot. In the same breath, he announced that Harbour was cast in the starring role with The Descent‘s Neil Marshall set to direct.

Mignola also made sure to previously point out that Hellboy would not be a superhero movie, per se.

“Well, I mean, if anything, we’re trying to do something very different.” Mignola explained. “Basically, there’s no part of Hellboy that was ever going to be like other superhero movies. And the more Marvel stuff there is, the more DC stuff there is, Hellboy never really feels like—even in the [Guillermo] del Toro things—a superhero movie. It’s so much “big teams of guys, in costumes, running around and saving the world from big cosmic menace stuff…” I believe the new movie will feel even less like a regular superhero thing. The idea with this one was to make it play much less like a superhero film, to downplay the superhero elements even more than del Toro did. This one is much more folklore/mythology/horror, and not ‘big team rushing into to do battle with whatever kind of stuff.’”

The Hellboy cast also includes Daniel Dae Kim, Milla Jovovich, Sasha Lane, Thomas Haden Church, Brian Gleeson, Sophie Okonedo, and Penelope Mitchell. Mignola had a hand in developing the script along with Andrew Cosby, Christopher Golden, and Aron Coleite.

Hellboy heads into theaters on April 12th.