Horror As Folk: Manly Wade Wellman and Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024)

Before we talk about Brian Taylor’s ill-starred 2024 adaptation of Hellboy: The Crooked Man, we need to talk about Manly Wade Wellman. Born in 1903, Wellman was called the “dean of fantasy writers” by Karl Edward Wagner and though he wrote prolifically and widely, he is best known for his numerous weird tales incorporating (and sometimes creating from whole cloth) Appalachian folklore.

A habitue of the pages of pulps like Weird Tales and Startling Stories, Wellman is one of my favorite “old dead white guy” writers, and one of the ones who had the most significant impact on my own fiction. He was also a big inspiration in the creation of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy – a debt that was acknowledged when Mignola and artist Richard Corben created one of Hellboy’s most memorable stories, “The Crooked Man,” as an homage to Wellman’s writing.

The strings of Wellman’s influence are plucked in the cinematic version, too, and not just in the places where film and comic overlap. Wellman Easter eggs are hidden throughout, from the author’s name on the locomotive at the beginning of the movie to a passing mention of Shonokins, a race of pre-human beings who are frequent villains in Wellman stories.

Despite his considerable popularity and influence, however, Wellman’s works have only rarely been adapted to the screen. Besides a handful of TV episodes, the only feature film bearing Wellman’s name is the doubtful 1972 flick The Legend of Hillbilly John, which will be included in Severin’s forthcoming second volume of folk horror.

That picture’s reputation is… not great, which makes Hellboy: The Crooked Man perhaps the closest we have ever come to a decent cinematic adaptation of Wellman. And it is decent. In fact, it kind of rules.

To understand how and why it rules, we have to know a little about the context under which it was made. This is the fourth live-action Hellboy movie, and the third distinct attempt to bring the big red guy to the big silver screen, following Guillermo del Toro’s twenty-year-old film and its 2008 sequel and then a regrettable 2019 rebrand that is better off forgotten.

The Crooked Man is the cheapest of those films, and the smallest in scope and ambition. With a budget of only $20 million, The Crooked Man cost about the same amount to make as the first Conjuring movie. By comparison, GdT’s first Hellboy movie had a budget of at least three times as much, and that in 2004 dollars.

These budgetary limitations sweep The Crooked Man’s legs out from under it every time it relies on CGI, which is never anywhere near ready for prime time. The last act drags, and the characterization of Hellboy is still off (no one has ever quite gotten it right on film). Despite these problems, though, The Crooked Man is actually good, sometimes genuinely creepy, and often beat-for-beat from the comic its adapting.

It would be easy (and probably at least partially accurate) to chalk that fidelity to the source material up to the fact that this Hellboy’s screenplay comes to us from creator Mike Mignola himself along with frequent collaborator Christopher Golden and a credit from director Brian Taylor. But Taylor’s affection for and fundamental understanding of the story he’s telling are required to transfer even the most faithful screenplay into an equally diligent finished product, and it shines through here. After all, the 2019 Hellboy film lifted plenty of things practically verbatim from the page, too, and managed to completely misunderstand almost every one of them.

To some extent, there is a similar kind of understanding at work in Manly Wade Wellman’s stories. At his best, Wellman’s generous and genuine approach to Appalachian folklore makes it virtually impossible to tell where he is sampling from actual folk traditions, doing jazz improvisations on them, or simply making things up from scratch. Meaning that Wellman’s stories often feel like genuine folklore, even when they aren’t.

At the same time, Mignola’s script for the comic version of “The Crooked Man” understands Wellman’s approach and emulates it perfectly, juxtaposing real bits of folk belief with made-up stuff in a way that makes it all feel of a piece. One of the best moments in the comic – implausibly translated to the screen almost verbatim – is an unlikely aside in which a horror host-like character named Grammy Oakum appears out of nowhere in order to break the fourth wall and tell readers how to make “witchballs.”

“You folks wanna trade your souls for some balls a poison?” Grammy Oakum asks after a credibly detailed recipe. “Grammy Oakum says you go right at it, and she’ll see you all in hell.”

Given how rich the tradition of Appalachian folk horror is, finding it on film is almost as rare as finding an adaptation of Wellman’s writing. While probably only as adjacent to real folk beliefs as it is to Wellman’s stories, Hellboy: The Crooked Man is nonetheless an admirable example of both, which makes it a damn shame that an ailing distributor has dumped it rather unceremoniously onto VOD to die.

It’s also the first film to attempt to adapt one of Hellboy’s smaller, more horror-tinged stories, rather than a graphic novel-sized epic, and it’s all the better for it. Perhaps it will find its following as a cult film among the faithful, even if it doesn’t get the chance at a theatrical bow.