New trailer for Hellboy: The Crooked Man looks like a folk horror nightmare

Hellboy in The Crooked Man — (Image credit: Ketchup Entertainment)

We've got your UK exclusive look at the new Hellboy: The Crooked Man trailer, and it's a folk horror nightmare.

In the clip, which you can watch below, we see Hellboy faced with an unusual foe: a girl who looks to be possessed, with a snake wrapping around her body. Luckily, Hellboy wastes no time in ripping the snake away and wrestling it to the ground – then gruesomely popping its head with one hand. Yuck.

That's not the only weird thing in the trailer, though, with one person seeming to swallow a raccoon, flashes of religious horror, and an appearance from the shadowy villain, the Crooked Man himself. Ominous…

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In short, it looks like a grounded, absolutely terrifying horror movie, with a heavy folk and religious influence. Sign us up!

The film stars Jack Kesy as Hellboy, with Jefferson White, Joseph Marcell, Martin Bassindale, Leah McNamara, Adeline Rudolph, Hannah Margetson, Nathan Cooper, and Carola Colombo co-starring. Brian Taylor directs from a script co-written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Taylor himself.

"So often I would come in late on projects where somebody else had already put the pieces together in a way that didn't quite fit," Mignola told us at this year's San Diego Comic-Con. "And this time, I got a chance to say, 'We're going to do The Crooked Man, we're going to stick to that story.' We need to add a little bit of backstory. So we borrowed it from one other story so we didn't have to make up new stuff."

Icon Film Distribution presents Hellboy: The Crooked Man in UK cinemas from 27 September. For more on what's ahead, check out our guide to all the upcoming major movie release dates of the year.

I'm the Deputy Entertainment Editor here at GamesRadar+, covering all things film and TV for the site's Total Film and SFX sections. I previously worked on the Disney magazines team at Immediate Media, and also wrote on the CBeebies, MEGA!, and Star Wars Galaxy titles after graduating with a BA in English.