This is how you make a trailer.
20th Century Fox is doing their part to try and change up the superhero genre to prevent it from going stale. Deadpool (2016) was a raunchy, R-rated comedy and Logan (2017) was a dark, western-themed drama. Now, the production company has unveiled the trailer (appropriately releasing it on Friday the 13th) for their newest project — X-Men: The New Mutants — which is shaping out to be a straight up horror movie. We couldn’t be more excited about it.
From director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars), New Mutants is shaping out to be a very different kind of super-hero movie — something that seems to be somewhat in the same vein as A Cure for Wellness or FX’s Legion.
Boone told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year: “We are making a full-fledged horror movie set within the X-Men universe. There are no costumes. There are no supervillains. We’re trying to do something very, very different.”
The trailer takes that idea and runs with it, as the whole thing is set in this creepy hospital/insane asylum. “This isn't a hospital,” says one of the characters off-screen, “It's a haunted house.” With an unsettling cover of Plink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and a number of disturbing images and jump scares to boot, New Mutants looks completely different than anything we’ve seen in the genre before.
The film features a talented cast that includes Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) as Wolfsbane, Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) as Magik, Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) as Cannonball, Henry Zaga (13 Reasons Why) as Sunspot and Blu Hunt as Mirage — all of whom are the mutants who are discovering their powers and are trapped in this hospital.
Dr. Cecilia Reyes, played by Alice Braga in a role that was originally going to go to Rosario Dawson, is the one in charge of the whole operation and is responsible for the teenager’s trauma. “Did you know baby rattlesnakes are more dangerous than adult ones?” she says in the trailer. “They haven’t learned how to control how much venom they secrete.”
This trailer is striking, memorable and is getting us pretty excited to see the actual film. Boone seems to be bringing in a whole bounty of fresh and scary ideas into the X-Men Universe, and we applaud Fox for having the guts to trust him with this property.
X-Men: The New Mutants will be released on April 13, 2018. Watch the trailer here and then let us know in the comments below what you thought of the trailer and whether you’re excited to see this one or not.