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Intersections: Hellboy Meets Dracula

Mike Mignola's Dark Comic Hero Inspired by Legendary Vampire

by Neda Ulaby

 

Dark Horse Comics

Mike Mignola on the movie set of Hellboy.

 

 

 

Sony Pictures

Hellboy brings Mignola's big-fisted, red-skinned demon-hero to the silver screen.

 

 

 

• Movie Clips

   Watch Clips from 'Hellboy'
  
   View Trailers for 'Hellboy', and Commentaries from Its Director and Star
  
  
   

 

 

Mike Mignola/ Dark Horse Comics

Detail of a panel from Hellboy: Seeds of Destruction.

 

 

 

• 'Hellboy' Comic Books

  Read several of Hellboy's adventures online:

  » 'The Corpse'
  
  » 'The Wolves of Saint August'
  
  » 'The Vārcolac'
  
  » 'B.P.R.D' (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense)
   

 

 

View a Trailer for the 1992 Film 'Bram Stoker's Dracula'

An old wall drawing of Vlad the Impaler in an ancient house in Transylvania. The bloodiest legends about the 15th-century ruler inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Mignola worked on the comic book for Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film adaptation.

 

 

Morning Edition, April 5, 2004 · Based on a comic book, the new movie Hellboy features a monster-fighting hero who also happens to be a demon in the employ of the U.S. government. Creator Mike Mignola tells Intersections, a series on artists' influences, that he drew inspiration from another famous creature of the dark: Dracula. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports.

Mignola says he first encountered Bram Stoker's Dracula as a sixth grader. The dark gothic novel about a blood-sucking count soon drew him in: "I don't know what I'd been reading up to that point, but when I read Dracula I said, 'I'm done thinking about other stuff. I've found my thing!'

"It's the atmosphere and the mystery, the idea of a world beyond ours that functions in a way we'll never completely understand… It's perfect. It just clicked," he says.

Dracula enticed Mignola into another world; Hellboy allowed him to inhabit it. Stoker used letters and documents to tell a story that blends grisly folktales with a real-life medieval prince known as Vlad the Impaler. Hellboy is also a pastiche, assembling fictional photos and case studies with elements of folklore, supernatural stories and World War II history. The title character is a demon wrenched from hell by a Nazi mystical experiment gone awry. Adopted by U.S. agents, Hellboy now works as a government investigator of paranormal incidents.

Mignola has been writing Hellboy for more than a decade. At first, he supported himself with other jobs, including writing the comic book for the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula and helping to design the vampire film Blade 2, directed by Mexican horror auteur Guillermo del Toro. A long-time fan of Mignola's comic books, del Toro also directed the Hellboy movie adaptation. Like Mignola, del Toro believes that folklore is a way of making sense of history -- and the human experience.

"We both believe that anything you want to learn about people, you can learn from monster movies," del Toro says. "And anything about monsters, you can learn from the evening news."

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