Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Nuada is Hellboy's Shadow made regal. Both are creatures of the old dark, both are stronger than the humans around them, both have every reason to resent a world that cast them out. Nuada voices exactly what Hellboy's resentment would say if it were given a crown and a cause: the humans are ungrateful, the pact is broken, burn it down and take back what is ours.

The Jungian task is not to kill the Shadow but to face it and refuse to be ruled by it. Hellboy does precisely this. In the Troll Market, at the Angel of Death, at the final duel, he is forced again and again to hear that he is fighting for people who will never accept him. And still he chooses them. The film's most honest moment is when the human agents, having watched him save them, decide they want him gone anyway. Hellboy integrates his Shadow by acknowledging every word of it as true and declining to act on it. The prince who could not do that dies. The demon who could, lives, and loses the world's gratitude for it.

The forest elemental is the heart of the film's shamanic core. Nuada releases the last of its kind in the middle of a city street, and it grows into a vast plant-god, the axis of the old living world, beautiful and unbearable in the wrong place. In shamanic terms this is a nature spirit, a tutelary power of the green world, the very thing a shaman would be initiated to serve and protect.

Hellboy is handed a gun and told to kill it to save bystanders. He does, and as the elemental dies it bursts into a cascade of flowers and green that briefly reclaims the concrete, the sacred world flooding back for one moment before it is gone. Liz sees what he cannot say aloud: he has just killed something holy. The kill is no victory: a shaman forced to slay the god he was born to guard, in exchange for a place among the people who made him do it. The cost of belonging to humanity is that Hellboy must help humanity finish the murder of the magical world he came from.