To me [horror is] the genre of unease. It makes me feel really uneasy and it gives me kind of a creepy feeling. It can border on wanting to look away, it can border on disgust—but that’s a type of horror. Horror can be any genre. There’s science fiction horror, there’s dark fantasy that’s really really dark, there can be mysteries that converge on horror. It depends on how far you want to go down the path of darkness.

When the first Hellboy series came out, in the same batch of fan mail I got a letter from somebody from the Church of Satan and I got a letter from a minister, and they both liked it. And I thought, “What am I doing that I’m making both these guys happy?”

What I would say to the young me is, “Don’t be a snob. Acknowledge that work done in the genre can be just as beautiful and literary as any book by your favorite mainstream writer, Updike, Roth, Bellow. If there has not yet been a Scott Fitzgerald of horror fiction, there ought to be one day. Do what you can and don’t worry so much. As long as you bring forth what is in you, everything is going to be all right. You’re going to be surprised.”

I see the passage into death as an immense transition from the temporal into the eternal. I think there’s a tremendous focused power involved in that particular moment. Dead bodies for a while, I think, still have some of that force. So the idea of people who went around habitually murdering other people solely for the experience of murdering them, that is, participating in this great process—in an evil way, of course—from an unappetizing, mentally-ill manner, they couldn’t help but be interesting to me.