As previously mentioned, on Monday I did some interviews for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, opening wide July 11, and Mike Mignola, the originator of the source material, talked a little bit about his collaborations with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro — including a rather strange visit to a haunted house with the Pan’s Labyrinth director and composer Danny Elfman.

“This is one of those things that Guillermo always says will happen, and then usually never happens,” recounts Mignola, with a smile. “But he lured me over to England during post-production on the first film by saying, ‘Hey, you, me and Danny Elfman should get a haunted hotel room.’ But we did, and then we decided to each spend a half-hour alone in the room. Guillermo very much changed his mind when we turned out the lights and it was his turn. He wasn’t as keen on it then. And then Danny’s cell phone rang, and it has some sort of Nightmare Before Christmas ring-tone, and he and I nearly wet ourselves laughing. Nothing happened, but it was very interesting,” to say the least.

Mignola, who said he pushed to move the character of Lobster Johnson from the second film to a possible third movie after some late studio and producer wavering on the matter (“I said you’ve written a very specific story for a medium, and switching [from Johan Krauss to Lobster Johnson] now, late in development, would be like saying, well, we can’t get Superman, let’s just put in Batman instead — you can’t swap them out,” he explains), feels that del Toro has plenty of material in mind to continue to franchise, as long as box office returns warrant it. “If Guillermo puts everything in the third film that he’s talked about, it’ll be about 180 hours long,” Mignola says.