If you ever wanted to see a cross between a superhero fare and a horror film, you are in luck. New Mutants is the latest in the long line of X-Men films, 11th to be precise. Like all X-Men films, it is based on Marvel’s comics but the director Josh Boone, otherwise known for directing The Fault in Our Stars, has added his own twist to it. There is a bunch of child mutants who may be only now discovering their powers, but instead of being protected by the kind and comforting Professor Charles Xavier, they are held in a secret hospital under a sinister mentor who uses a metaphor of baby rattlesnakes to describe their powers to the mutant children.

The trailer begins with a shot of a dark hallway, and the mentor’s not-so-comforting voiceovers. As Alice Braga voice goes on, one sees nicely edited shots of the film in which every classic horror trope is liberally used. There are strange voices, ghostly hands and faces seem to come out of the rubbery walls, and so on. There is nothing terribly new, but the scares seem effective and the film looks pretty terrifying.

New Mutants may be an X-Men film, but the trailer seems to be focusing only on the horror elements and presumingly the film, too, will be marketed as such. That is not a bad thing, but perhaps only a glimpse of how the powers of the mutants will come into play would have been nice. Genre straddling is generally good, but it may backfire especially when moviegoers are confused as to what kind of movie they will see when they enter into the theaters.

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