How confident is Selma Blair these days? Why don't we let her explain: "People equate feeling alive with feeling fuckable," she says in a wry deadpan, as she kicks back in the lobby lounge at Los Angeles' swanky Chateau Marmont hotel with her beloved one-eyed mutt, Wink. "When you're in love and busy with work, you feel great, a lot of which is simply because you're feeling fuckable."

That's far more poise than we've come to expect from the 30-year-old actress, who's known for playing characters who are hopelessly out of touch with their own sexuality: the naive virgin seduced by Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions, the doting undergrad brutally debased by her writing professor in Storytelling, one of Cameron Diaz's romantically clueless gal pals in The Sweetest Thing. But Blair's latest film has taught her to understand horniness in an entirely different way.

This month, she stars as one of the few distinctly human characters in the dark fantasy Hellboy, from horror director Guillermo del Toro (The Devil's Backbone, Blade II). Based on the long-running Dark Horse Comics series written and illustrated by Mike Mignola, Hellboy concerns the titular demon (Ron Perlman), first summoned to Earth by Nazis during World War II, who grows up to be a superhero in the present day. That's when he hooks up with Blair (who plays a flame-throwing pyrotechnist named Liz Sherman) to fight evil and, well, hook up. Though she wasn't initially familiar with the source material ("Batman was dark and comforting enough for me in high school"), Blair found a kindred spirit in her alter ego. "Liz was a misfit as a kid, who had this power she didn't know how to control," she says. "She spent her life as a refugee, and Hellboy [and his paranormal allies] became her freak family."

This should be an area of expertise for Blair, who in January married Ahmet Zappa, the oddball actor/musician son of late freak-rock pioneer Frank Zappa. Now she can't help but express her affection in inappropriate ways, even when she's bestowing it on her dog. "I feel like that line in Punch-Drunk Love: 'I want to take a sledgehammer to your face,'" she says. "'I want to squeeze your face into a million little pieces so I can put it back together again.' It's so morbid-I don't even know why I'm talking about it."

Before he was felled by one of her industrial-size love taps, Ahmet Zappa was able to give her a proper introduction to the Hellboy universe. "He's had the action figures for years. He got me into that whole Harry Knowles world for the first time." That was before the gargantuan, red-bearded guru of Aintitcoolnews.com actually visited the film's set. "I met Harry and was so smitten by him," says Blair, "but then I made the mistake of going on his website, where someone wrote, 'Selma Blair as Liz Sherman? I hope they can fix it in postproduction.'"

All this time spent in the company of monsters was the ideal preparation for her next project, John Waters' black comedy A Dirty Shame, in which she plays Ursula Udders, a go-go dancer with "ginormous breasts," she says. "Prosthetic ones that took three hours to apply. I was naked in front of everyone every day. I don't have a modest bone in my body anymore." Someday, "I'd love to play 'the normal girl' if that means getting the wider audience and the better lighting," Blair says through a devious grin. "But I don't have a competitive streak with other actresses. Although that Dakota Fanning-when they chose her over me for The Cat in the Hat, it really fucked me up. I guess executives thought she was more fuckable."

The Devil You Know Recounting the whole damned origin of Hellboy

"I won't say Dracula is all I ever think about," says veteran comic-book artist Mike Mignola, "but since I was in sixth grade, that stuff is all I've ever read." For more than 20 years, the 43-year-old Mignola has earned his singularly spooky reputation illustrating (and often writing) stories that placed superheroes in atmospheric, horror-inspired situations, a body of work that includes the creep-tacular Batman-meets-Jack the Ripper graphic novel Gotham by Gaslight.

By the early '90s, Mignola had begun concocting a character of his own, one that would allow him to explore his macabre fixations more fully. A series of doodles scrawled at comicbook conventions yielded a demon in street clothes, whom he impulsively named Hellboy. "If I were a different artist," he says, "I probably would have [made him] a normal guy who's an occult detective. But knowing that I would get tired of that, I said, 'Let me make the main character a monster, and he fights monsters, so then I'm drawing nothing but monsters.'"

A decade later, Hellboy is a monster hit with indie-comics fans, one that combines elements from the masters of gothic horror (including Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft) with imagery from Mignola's Catholic upbringing: "All that sitting in church, listening to someone talk about hell and punishment, does something to you." But ultimately, Hellboy is about an inhuman creature with a soul. "I can't write [dialogue for] the big hard-ass hero," Mignola says. "Hellboy is partly me, he's partly my father, and yet he's the Beast of the Apocalypse." If you think that reveals more about the creator than his creation, Mignola agrees. "Yeah, there's a lot of stuff to be dealt with there." DAVE ITZKOFF