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"Believe it or not, he's the good guy."

So proclaims the tagline for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, opening in theaters this week.

Well, he definitely needs explaining. With his horns—filed to stumps or not—as well as his red skin, goatee and tail, Hellboy overtly embodies universally recognizable cultural iconography of the enemy of mankind in the great war of powers and principalities.

This imagery isn't limited to Christianity. George Lucas claimed to have included Hindu and Greek mythology in researching the look of the similarly demonic-looking Darth Maul. ("A lot of evil characters have horns," Lucas told Bill Moyers in 1999).

Hellboy's gun fires glass bullets filled with holy water

Still, Hellboy's world—like those of other recent supernatural-themed films including Constantine and Ghost Rider—seems significantly shaped by Christian culture. (All three of these films are based on comic books; other recent comic-book movies lacking supernatural themes have offered similar instances of religious imagery, including Daredevil and X2.)

Hellboy himself is a Dark Horse Comics character, created in 1993 by Mike Mingola. In the comics, Hellboy is a demon brought to earth as an infant by Nazi occultists, who intend to use him for evil purposes. But after being rescued by Allied Forces, he ends up being raised by the USA's Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), and grows up to be large, red-skinned, with a tail, horns (which he files off), and a giant right fist of stone. He's one of the good guys, fighting the occult and demons as one of the BPRD's special agents.

As a "good demon," Hellboy may be a walking oxymoron, but he's the singular exception to the rule. The first Hellboy movie establishes the occult world as a distinctly unfriendly place; the title character aside, demons are creatures of pure evil, existing only to destroy and consume. Moreover, those who battle them use crosses, crucifixes, rosaries and other recognizable emblems of Christian faith.

In this regard, Hellboy is heir to a movie tradition going back to the B-movie Hammer horror films of the 1950s and '60s, particularly those directed by Terence Fisher (The Devil's Bride, Horror of Dracula), a high-church Anglican. Fisher's films depict demons, vampires and all creatures of evil helpless before the inexorable power of the cross.

Dracula, repelled by a crucifix

Bela Lugosi's Dracula in 1931 may have cringed from a crucifix dangling from a potential victim's neck, but Fisher turned the cross into a weapon capable of damaging and even destroying evil. (The Christian worldview of Fisher's Hammer horrors has been explored at some length by Presbyterian clergyman Paul Leggett in Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion.)

Fisher's "weaponized" portrayal of crosses, crucifixes, holy water and the like has greatly influenced the portrayal of evil in pop entertainment, from Hellboy and Constantine to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Church also has some sort of role combating the powers of darkness in films like Van Helsing and John Carpenter's Vampires, even if crosses and other Christian symbols may not have the power they do elsewhere.

At the same time, the Christian influence originally so significant in Fisher's world is often vestigial at best in these later stories. Too often, notions of faith and God are nearly or entirely absent, the Church is little more than an eccentric world power, and the cross little more than a talisman or magic charm.

A scene from 'The Exorcist'

In other films, though, real Christian belief and the Church as an institution relying on faith against the gates of hell comes to the surface, perhaps most obviously in The Exorcist and more recently The Exorcism of Emily Rose. These films depict spiritual warfare in a less stylized but also more ambiguous way, with the tide of battle not so black-and-white as in a Hammer horror film. (Emily Rose director Scott Derrickson, a Christian, has discussed how horror films can be a good medium for pointing to God.)

Among The Exorcist's most vivid moments is the scene in which two priests stand side by side holding crosses, shouting in unison, "The power of Christ compels you!" as the possessed girl hovers several feet above the bed. In a Hammer horror, that would have been the end of the struggle; here this spiritual warfare seems to leave both the demon and the priests depleted, with the girl sinking to the bed and the priests retiring to catch their breaths.

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