Hellboy Red Band Trailer Brings Fire, Flames, And F-Bombs

Trailer contains explicit language

This boy is back, and he's on fire. 

Lionsgate Pictures and Summit Entertainment ushered in a new month of 2019 with a (literal) hot treat: the red band trailer for the R-rated Hellboy reboot, starring Stranger Things favorite David Harbour as the titular half-demon hero. 

Contrary to the first footage fans saw of the fresh Hellboy flick, this new trailer is a little more vulgar and a lot more violent. (It is a red band trailer, after all.)

First, it teases Hellboy's origins: he's one part demon thanks to his biological father Azzael and one part human human thanks to his witch mother Sarah, the meaning of his real name Anung Un Rama promises that a crown of flame will rest upon his head, he quickly attracts the attention of a cult of Nazis who bring him to Earth as a baby, and he's raised as a mostly normal boy by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm (played by Ian McShane), who works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. Then, it reveals that Hellboy didn't until recently know that he was prophesied to bring about the apocalypse and the demon that the Nazi occultists summoned from the depths of Hell was him. 

Hellboy's status as a protector of the people of Earth, a member of the B.P.R.D. and a powerful monster-hunter, makes the notion of him destroying mankind extremely hard to swallow. But so does his inherent nature as a demon — as does the fifth-century sorceress Nimue the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich), who arrives to play a little torture-and-kill game with the humans while attempting to persuade Hellboy to join her side, the side of his brethren. She wonders aloud why Hellboy would choose to guard the same people who fear him and those like him, and Hellboy begins to sense a sort of familial connection to her. 

An all-important question soon rises: Does Hellboy feel more at home with the humans who may not "get" him entirely but who have shown him love, or would he better fit in the demons who can understand who he is on a blood level? 

To come to a conclusion, Hellboy does what any normal end-of-days-bringing half-demon would do: slaughter a bunch of gnarly creatures, try to resist the temptation of the enigmatic Nimue, bring the Blood Queen down without accidentally setting off the apocalypse himself, and crack a few jokes along the way. 

The red band Hellboy reboot trailer is heavy on the gore and general viscera, showing Hellboy slicing and dicing up monsters 20 times his size, the severed limbs of his victims spraying blood all over the place. It also teases a steamy make-out session between Hellboy and a woman who appears to be Nimue (now there's a plot twist) in the middle of a rainstorm of blood, and gives us an exhilarating look B.P.R.D. member Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) succumbing to the curse that forces him to transform into a horrific werewolf-slash-jaguar creature. (For those with sensitive stomachs, look away from your screen when you see bloody nails start to pop off from fingers.)

Of course, the red band trailer would be nothing without a peppering of expletives. Hellboy couches the best F-bomb of the bunch in a hilarious line he gives to Nimue: "This is not gonna work, you know, because I'm a Capricorn and you're f***ing nuts!"

Being totally honest here, this new look at Hellboy is more what we had in mind for the film as compared to the first trailer, which leaned into the comedic aspects of the movie rather than the darkness and terror. Director Neil Marshall and Hellboy comics creator Mike Mignola time and again promised that the reboot would be chilling, thrilling, and definitely worthy of its R-rating; Harbour himself affirmed that it was going to be a "real monster movie that's dark and scary." But for a lot of fans, the initial Hellboy reboot trailer (set to Billy Idol's "Mony, Mony") felt like a completely different film, one reminiscent of campy Marvel superhero fare like Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok as opposed to a gritty take on comics' favorite not-so-little hellion. The red band trailer aligns perfectly with what Marshall, Mignola, and Harbour have said of the movie, and we couldn't be more excited to see the final product. 

Also featuring Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan, Thomas Haden Church as Lobster Johnson, Penelope Mitchell as Ganeida, Sophie Okonedo as Lady Hatton, Brian Gleeson as Merlin, Alistair Petrie as Lord Adam Glaren, and more, Hellboy will raise some hell in theaters on April 12.