First posted May 2022.

Welcome back to my essay series delving into the fairytale influences of Guillermo del Toro’s films! Today, I’m taking a look at Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

It’s almost too easy to talk about the fairytale heritage of a film that opens with the reading of a fairytale. Mike Mignola said of this film, compared to the first Hellboy, "The focus is more on the folklore and fairytale aspect of Hellboy. It's not Nazis, machines and mad scientists but the old gods and characters who have been kind of shoved out of our world.”

If I were getting pedantic — and really, what is this series for if not that — we’re more in the myths and legends subset of folklore than the fairytale one, which is a somewhat different tradition but all under the same umbrella. The term ‘folklore’ encompasses all that’s just that: the lore of the folk, the stories of the people. Relative cultural understanding helps us put things in different boxes — for example, why it would be incorrect to label the stories of the Hawaiian gods as ‘fairytales’ rather than ‘mythology’ — but in the case of Hellboy II, we’re certainly dealing with a fairytale-flavoured legend.

The story goes that a war raged between humans and the magical folk (elves, ogres, and goblins). An ogre blacksmith built the elven king a golden mechanical army, with a magical golden crown that allowed the wearer to command the army if unchallenged. Against the advice of the elven prince, Nuada, the king brokered a truce with humans, and it was decided that the magical folk would keep to the forests if the humans would keep to their own lands. To cement the truce, the elven king broke the golden crown into three pieces, one of which was kept by the humans. Outraged, Nuada went into exile and vowed to return when his people most needed him.

This last bit reminds me of the legend of Sir Francis Drake’s drum, held at Buckland Abbey. Apparently before he died he promised that, should England ever be in trouble and someone were to beat this drum, he would return to save the country. There are reports of people hearing the drum beat itself, which may account for the alternate reporting of the legend as that the drum will sound before Drake returns to save the country.

Drake isn’t the only one waiting for Britain’s time of greatest need, of course. An old English fairytale speaks of King Herla, who disappeared following a dwarf over a cliff, and found on his return he’d been gone not three days as he thought, but a hundred years, and now wanders England eternally, waiting for his time to defeat England’s enemies and finally earn his rest. Arthurian myth is a widely, widely varied bunch of stories, but starting around the 12th century we start to see mentions of King Arthur promising to return to save the people of Britain, hence the ‘once and future king.’ Welsh versions of Arthurian legend don’t tend to mention him coming back, which is only really curious because there is in fact a Welsh tradition of a messianic figure coming back to save Wales: Y Mab Darogan. But maybe they’ve got enough actual candidates for him that they didn’t feel like Arthur needed to be in the running as well.

As an aside, where are all these guys! I think we are in it pretty deep now, friends! Has someone tried the drum??

Anyway, it’s Irish legend we should look to for direct inspiration for Hellboy II. Obviously the film ends in Ireland, and the elf characters speak an ancient dialect of Gaelic (I’m assuming it’s Irish Gaelic, given everything else in this movie, but I couldn’t find a direct answer in my research — modern Irish Gaelic speakers say it’s not modern Irish, and in the director commentary del Toro just says it’s ‘ancient Gaelic’). And Ireland has its own king asleep in the mountain: Fionn mac Cumhaill. He sleeps in a cave surrounded by his band of warriors, and when his hunting horn is sounded three times, he will arise and defend Ireland.

Unlike our world’s slackers, Prince Nuada does, in fact, return to protect the magical world from the ever-encroaching humans, tearing down the forests they vowed not to touch in order to create supermarkets and shopping malls. Hellboy stands to protect humans from monsters, but what he grapples with in this film is which side he lands on — after all, he isn’t human himself.

Guillermo del Toro uses red very deliberately in his films, as we’ve seen with The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, and The Shape of Water. Hellboy himself is red, and in the commentary on this film, del Toro explained his use of red, gold, and other earthy colours to represent the magical world and its people. He also mentioned this as a response to criticism of the first Hellboy, which people said was hard to follow. Relying more consciously and heavily on symbolism and visual clues to support the story in this one only increases the fairytale feel.

I mentioned in the essay in this series on Pacific Rim that fairytales rely on tropes and symbols to tell stories concisely. Here is the elven princess wearing blue, standing in a blue-gold room with the blue Abe Sapien, and just looking at the colours, you already know their whole story. They don’t get much screen time but their subplot still carries an emotional weight, echoed by their ability to know each other fully just through one touch of hands. You get the full idea of them just through the symbolic colours of them and their environments. It’s a great film technique, but it’s also a classic fairytale technique. If a story presents you with one dark-haired sister and one fair-haired sister, you already know the score. A man in black and a man in white are known quantities the moment they appear.

The magical creatures in this film contribute to the feeling of immersion in the world of fairytales. From the vicious Tooth Fairies, to the background appearances of the fairies from Pan’s Labyrinth (during the production and post-production of which he wrote Hellboy II), to the vastly populated Troll Market, the screen is filled with the denizens of folklore and fairytales. I wanted to mention Christina Rossetti’s poem, Goblin Market, as a potential influence on the Troll Market — more in general idea than in specific reference to the poem, but if you were looking for an excuse to read or re-read it, here you go!

We also couldn’t leave this movie without talking about the incredible Angel of Death scene. Played, of course, by your favourite creature actor and mine and del Toro’s, Doug Jones, the Angel gives Liz the power to choose whether Hellboy lives or dies. The Angel informs her that Hellboy’s fate is to destroy the earth, and because I am myself a creature of habit, I heard the word ‘fate’ and immediately went on a thought spiral.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on the Greek Moirai, or the Fates, for the Greek myth-inspired D & D campaign I run. An interesting thread (pun semi-intended) I’ve picked up on is that even the Fates were not considered an antithesis of free will; they were understood to spin many different conditional possibilities, and which one came to pass relied on the free choice of the individual. In Hellboy’s case, one thread spun for him shows him destroying the earth, but we don’t know if this will necessarily come to pass. There’s no third Hellboy movie, anyway, so what happens next is entirely speculation. Maybe he does destroy the earth, maybe he doesn’t, but whichever way it goes is entirely his call — because, of course, Liz chooses to save him. Once more, the Beast saves the Beast.