Very early on in the production of 20th Century Fox’s The New Mutants, the new X-Men spin-off film from the mutant-centric side of the Marvel universe (as opposed to the MCU side), director Josh Boone said he was making a straight-up horror film. Holy hell, he wasn’t kidding.
This isn’t your usual superhero movie. There’s no standard hero’s journey, intermixed with the normal dash of interpersonal drama and a big set-piece ending. It’s not off the regular Marvel assembly line, in other words. This is out-and-out horror, that just happens to involve young people with extraordinary abilities. “Did you know baby rattlesnakes are more dangerous than adult ones?” Alice Braga’s Dr. Reyes asks Blu Hunt’s Danielle Moonstar, a.k.a. Mirage. The implication: You kids are scary as hell, because you don’t know how to control your powers yet.
Still, that doesn’t fully explain why unknown forces have imprisoned five young mutants inside an eerie hospital, one that’s more like a “haunted house,” in the words of another superpowered youth. It looks like there might be some kind of a “survive the night” angle to their ordeal in this facility, which we would normally describe as “ghost-filled” but might be something way creepier, like the trapped souls of still-living mutants. We won’t know until the film comes out, but until then, you’ll just have to watch Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, and Henry Zaga (as Wolfsbane, Magik, Cannonball, and Sunspot, respectively) join Mirage in being terrified throughout this trailer. The New Mutants comes out April 13, 2018. Congrats to this creative team for trying something different with the superhero genre.