^{One of del Toro’s main concerns was the design of Sammael.}

GDT: The two creatures that have taken the longest to figure out in my films are Sammael and the plant guy on Hellboy II. They took the longest. Sammael went through—I’m not exaggerating—probably thirty or forty iterations, at the very least. Full on, “Let’s go this way… No, no, let’s go that way.”

The elements I wanted were always there: bone, limbs that can change, a really long tongue. And here [opposite] I was just doing some anatomical sketches. The thing on the bottom right is the tongue. I was playing with the idea of limbs that could switchblade out of themselves. It’s not very clear in the rendering, but the bone is in the middle of the forearm, so you can extend the forearm. And I was trying to figure out how he would roll the tongue inside of the thorax. Like, how much space the tongue would occupy, if I could put human fingers at the end of the tongue. Silly stuff, but I was trying to figure it out.

MSZ: It’s great. And then are these little nonsensical annotations mixed in with Spanish?

GDT: Yeah, yeah, I liked them because I’ve always been in love with the idea of the Necronomicon.

MSZ: So, where does this fit into the design phase? Does it start with you doing something like this and then bringing it to your design team?

GDT: Yeah. This was done before I had Wayne Barlowe, or Mignola, or anyone.

MSZ: So this represents the beginning of the process.

GDT: Yes. In general, the more notes in the notebook, the less of a team I had.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 38A}

^{For a while during preproduction, Sammael had horns…}

–Kroenen’s room. A dirty mosaic. Filled with pipes and black hoses

MOUTH on his “hand”

Structures made of bars on every street and in all the cavities of the buildings.

HB.

TWO OR THREE NIPPLES ON ONE SIDE

Sammael must be asymmetric like a crab or a malformed foetus. He has 2 eyes on one side and a big ass on the other one. A small claw on one arm

He should be an ornate creature much like H.B markings. Call him “brother”

He has double-jointed legs if Mike Elizalde thinks so.

Bigger claw with a Haialai basket of boney tissue.

ROWS OF NODULES

^{…which were abandoned in favor of tentacles.}

^{The creature’s double-jointedness, seen in action in these storyboards by Simeon Wilkins, remained a defining characteristic throughout the creature design process.}

GDT: Sammael again [opposite]. Now, the one thing that I am sad we lost on Sammael was the horns, because I really liked that demonic silhouette. But we preserved a lot of stuff. I love that double-jointedness for the pincers, but, again, it was very hard to keep. And, as you can see, he was always asymmetric. But the elements are all there—the circles, the spirals, the bones extruding from the skin, the tentacles, the eyes, the many rows of warts, the protruding pelvis, and the double-jointed legs. Those were things that were important, and you see them repeated again and again in the drawings.

The problem is, when you see a drawing like this, I find the silhouette interesting, but it doesn’t feel like a creature. It feels like a bunch of notions put together.

MSZ: You said you were sorry to lose the horns. Why was that?

GDT: I liked the horns because they were designed to come out of the floating cheekbone, and then the floating cheekbone would echo the first row of horns, and then the second. I just liked that it had an African mask quality.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 40A}

–100,000 dollars you can visualize. A 1,000,000 fits in 2–3 cubic feet. Buys you a house. A really, really big, nice house. Then you start going into abstraction. Well is the same thing with years.

TANOSHI WILLOW TOWN—Boken Shonen Shadar, Ogon Bat, Toriton (OSAMU, T Nekome, Dororo, Marine and the patrol. oceanica, Okami Shonen Ken (pepito) Fushigina Melmo, Skyers-5 (s-5

–The interesting thing about Junji Ito is that he rarely offers explanations in his horror stories. He was a dental assistant and in a certain way his brand of horror shares the same precise attention to biological detail and exerts the same morbid fascination as his old job. Show, don’t tell.

–The Sammaels move in unison like a “chorus line” a la Harryhausen in Jason.

–The world’s greatest paranormal detective. I must say he can’t detect much can he—?

–In Wind in the Willows, the trees move so that people can’t get in, and the animals greet one another with “may man avoid you” or “may man ignore you” whether it’s day or night.

–The Beaver [?] (the human “boat”) in the gigantic [?] and, in order to save himself, he must abandon his “human” body.

–Toad and Beaver become very good friends, and at the end they’re seen flying together in an enormous dirigible that they both built together. Only Ratty is an adult. The others are children.

GDT: What’s great about this page [above] is the mechanism in Sammael’s arm is almost exactly how it came out. The unfolding blade is there, and on the facing page [opposite] you can see me again trying asymmetric eyes. The wart rolls, the tentacles. And this element of the protruding bone again. But that didn’t make it.

And there’s a little note to have Hellboy grabbing the mosaic or the tile as he is being dragged backward, which made it into the subway scene [opposite, top]. In a different way, but I did it. I originally wanted it for a fight with Kroenen, but, you know. One does what one can.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 40B}

–Mammalian Diving reflex. Body memory.

–The Sammaels move in “Chorus line”–style in the egg chamber

–Hellboy uses his hand to stop himself from sliding, destroying the mosaic floor.

–Random ideas for Sammy

–His shoulder blades have peaks on them that stick out in his silhouette.

Old, hard bone

String of nodules that stand up and push against each other.

Only one eye on this side, but it‘s a big O and blind

Layers that peel back to reveal the horse’s skull beneath them.

Human eyes, but in groups of 3, 5 on one side.

2 of his tentacles should be translucent with blood inside.

The other tentacles form a “mane” around his mouth.

A large number of nodules and infected, asymmetrical nipples on his sunken, dead chest.

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 20A}