So, let me see if I’ve got this right:
There is an afterlife! Yes, as it turns out, after we shuffle off this mortal coil, we’ll still have some variety of existence available to us. The bad news? There’s at least a decent probability we’ll wind up in a punishment-based hell populated by demons who delight in tormenting the wicked for all of eternity. Better still, these demons may already walk among us now, possessing and/or tempting us in order to secure our futures in hell.
Well, shit.

Movies, books, and folktales have depicted demons in a wide variety of ways— everything from a well-dressed barterer at a crossroads to a projectile-vomiting Linda Blair to the hyper-violent baddies of Supernatural and Lucifer. From Dante to Screwtape, demons poke at our insecurities about the afterlife and how the things we do here may affect our time there. In effect, these sometimes-pitchfork-wielding terrors have a lot more to do with our fear of consequences than any innate horror they might possess. Yep, all the hellish imagery and threats of torment are really secondary to our own sense of guilt and the feeling that we deserve punishment.

And that’s why demons are scary.

Huh, well that was a little anticlimactic.
There’s got to be a little more to this than just “demons are a manifestation of our hardwired feelings of guilt and inadequacy.” I mean, even the expression “Everyone has their demons” revolves around the idea that we all have shortcomings which generate insecurity. I could probably do a series at some point on different types of demons in art and folklore, but I kind of need to bring this Halloween season to a close. Hmm…

Wait, I’ve got it. Let’s spend a little time talking about my favorite demon, one who turns this whole concept on its head: Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

Odds are you’re more familiar with Hellboy from the Guillermo del Toro movie back in the mid-2000s, but the Hellboy character first appeared in comics in the early 90s. While Dark Horse Comics is still publishing stories set in his world, Hellboy’s journey came to its conclusion in 2016’s Hellboy in Hell 10-issue series, a worthy culmination of a two-decade story arc, followed by a coda in the 2019 BPRD: The Devil You Know. The Hellboy comics are littered with heartfelt homages and retellings of classic myths and legends (particularly Eastern European folklore), and Mignola’s art style conveys incredible emotion with his unique use of shadow and skewed proportion. But all that isn’t what makes the comics great.

As mentioned above, what makes demons scary is the way they play on our sense of guilt. Hellboy, however, is himself a demon and an underachieving one by the standards of his ghoulish family. Conjured on earth in the final days of World War II, Hellboy is fated to bring about the apocalypse, but he continually tries to escape this destiny by allying himself with humanity. Alongside the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), he fights the ghosts and monsters and witches and demons who would otherwise treat him as a peer. Yet on the periphery of every single adventure lies a lurking dread: Hellboy is to bring doom. Every interaction with a human being is shaped by his preemptive guilt for the pain he believes he will one day cause. Every interaction with a mythical creature is colored by Hellboy’s sense he is betraying his own kind for something foolhardy (even if noble). And Hellboy himself constantly quips and regards his work as “just a job” to downplay the constant tension in which he finds himself.

What would it mean to feel guilty about something you had not yet done? What does it mean to grow and rise to your full potential when said “potential” involves death and destruction on a cosmic scale? Can we ever really rewrite our destinies? And, at the end of the day, would it even be worth the torment of trying to change them?

Hellboy inverts the usual role of the demon: rather than the embodiment of our guilt for the things we’ve done and fear of the consequences, Hellboy himself carries constant fear and guilt over what he might do.

And that’s what makes Hellboy so compelling.

If you’re in the Jacksonville/St. Augustine area and want to give the Hellboy comics a read, I’ll happily hook you up; I have most of the trade paperbacks. If you’re farther out of town, reach out, and I can recommend some of the most essential stories. They’re easy enough to track down online and at used bookstores.

Well, this has been kind of a weird conclusion to this season’s “What Makes It Scary?” series, but then again, 2021 has been a pretty weird year in general!
The COVID-19 pandemic, with the losses we’ve experienced and our times in isolation, has invited a lot of reflection on who we are individually, as communities, and as a species. What I love about all this scary stuff is the way it also reveals something deeper about what it means to be human.
Vampire stories play on our complicated relationship to sexuality.
Aliens and sea monsters embody our fears of the unknown.
Zombies reflect our anxiety around loss of identity.
And demons, well, they reflect our sense of guilt.
The stories we tell reveal so much about us.
And the things we fear reveal so much about our culture.

So what makes any of this scary?
We do.
Our stories.
Our imaginations.
Our cultures.
Our collective creativity.
We do.

Happy Halloween, everyone!