For a rock-fisted demon destined to bring about the apocalypse, the Hellboy of Guillermo Del Toro’s films, played by Ron Perlman, was a pretty chill guy – someone you wouldn’t mind grabbing a beer with, if you could penetrate his layers of sarcasm and emotional defences. But with Neil Marshall taking over the series for a 2019 reboot, the Dog Soldiers and The Descent director is taking Mike Mignola’s comic book back towards more hardened horror territory, with a gore-soaked, R-rated incarnation. “It was always a case of, ‘When in doubt, go back to the source material.’ Some of the stuff is pretty sick,” Marshall tells Empire in the January 2019 issue. “More violent and more bloody. We weren’t making it with handcuffs on.”