I've always loved monsters, superheroes, and stories of redemption. To the surprise of many, I have recently become a fan of the Hellboy movies and graphic novels. I find them to be a playground for a Christian imagination and great fun.
I view the first movie as a metaphor of Christian conversion, regardless of whether the writers intended it that way or not. Since God made the world in order that he might redeem it, much of life resonates with redemptive themes if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. These redemptive themes permeate human art, even the art of atheists like Jean Paul Sarte (read his play "No Exit"). The gospel is inescapable in a world destined for redemption.
The first Hellboy movie begins with the question: "What makes a man? Is it something in his origins or is it in the choices he makes?" This question is especially poignant for Hellboy because his origin is Hell. Mike Mignola, the creator of the Hellboy mythology, and Guillermo Del Toro, his collaborator on the movies, explicitly raise the question: "Can a demon become a good man?"
Since God makes everything good, everything can be redeemed, if he wills it. The problem with demon-redemption is that Scripture does not tell us that God wills it. But this is not a problem, once you take the universe of Hellboy for what it is--a parallel world. It's like Narnia. Bacchus is a good-guy there and spiritism and spells aren't necessarily evil. This is because Aslan and the Emperor beyond the Sea use them as a means of revelation. You could probably say the same thing about the fairy tale magic of Harry Potter, except that world is Christian only in the moral sense of a real anti-thesis between good and evil and not so much in the redemptive sense of God incarnate laying down his life.
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien put forth the idea of sub-creation. Since we are made in the image of God we long to create as he does. Since he likes to make worlds, we do to. No world is exactly alike so it shouldn't surprise us if God might redeem a demon in one world but not another or choose to use "magic" in one world and "miracles" in another. The medieval theologian William of Ockham seems to shed some light here, when he says that God doesn't will things because they are good, they are good simply because God wills them or wills to use them positively.
The reason why I find Hellboy to be a beautiful metaphor for Christian conversion is because the Bible refers to us in our fallen condition in almost the same way. Jesus says to the Pharisees: "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires" (John 8:44). Paul says that we "were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind" (Eph 2:3). In a sense, we were all children of hell, and I was a hellboy. We all start out that way--condemned and sinful--and if Christ doesn't intervene we remain that way.
Hellboy makes a statement because he files his horns down. At the beginning of the movie someone says it's because he wants to fit in, but watch to the end and you'll see that it's more than that. Hellboy has been taught a "sense of right" by his adoptive father, pits himself against evil, isn't scared of the worst hell can dish out, is continually tempted to return to the side of his original father, and is humble enough to admit he's not unbeatable or very attractive to the humans he tries to save. The supernatural is tangibly real in this world though most humans are oblivious to it. There is also a clear anti-thesis between the good and evil sides of the supernatural, as they fight for control over the natural world. Catholic Christian symbolism and theology are overt at times (especially in the first movie and the "Hellboy: Blood and Iron" animated movie).
Do you believe in a God who can redeem a hellboy? God has a big imagination. Shouldn't we?
