The official trailer for Josh Boone's The New Mutants arrived in 2017 and announced the Fox X-Men franchise's most formally ambitious spin-off with a horror register and a gothic atmosphere that signals the film's intentions as something unlike anything the superhero genre had previously attempted. The haunted facility setting and the psychological horror imagery convey the film's genre ambitions with a directness and a confidence that immediately distinguishes it from the franchise's more conventionally staged action entries. Boone understood that the film's primary obligation was to deliver a genuinely frightening superhero film rather than simply a superhero film with horror aesthetics applied to its surface, and the trailer is built on that understanding with an atmospheric seriousness and a psychological intensity that makes it feel like a genuine creative statement about what the genre could achieve when it committed fully to a different formal register.
First Impressions
The trailer is immediately the superhero genre's most tonally distinctive horror entry, with the haunted facility setting and the psychological horror imagery conveying the film's genre ambitions with real conviction. The trailer identifies the horror register and the institutional confinement as the film's primary selling points. Boone is not making an X-Men film. He is making a horror film about young people trapped in a place that is trying to destroy them, and the trailer makes that distinction feel like the most formally adventurous creative decision in the franchise's history.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes the facility's sinister nature, conveys the young mutants' psychological torment, and glimpses the film's most unsettling sequences with enough visual clarity to establish its considerable horror ambitions. The Demon Bear's presence is suggested with atmospheric menace and visual dread that establish it as the film's central threat, and the trailer identifies the combination of superhero mythology and psychological horror as the elements that give the film its distinctive identity.
Music and Sound
The trailer's use of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall gives it an immediately iconic sonic identity that suits the film's institutional horror register with real precision. The musical choice conveys the film's themes of confinement, control, and psychological damage with a cultural resonance that makes the trailer feel genuinely distinctive within the superhero genre's marketing history, and the contrast between the song's familiar melody and the film's unsettling imagery creates a tension that is the trailer's most purely effective quality.
Most Memorable Moment
The Demon Bear's first appearance, glimpsed with a menace and a visual darkness that mark the film's defining horror image, is the trailer's most purely unsettling moment. The darkness. The shape within it. The trailer makes the moment feel like the most frightening thing the superhero genre has ever shown, which is exactly the creative ambition the film is reaching for.
Trailer Verdict
One of the superhero genre's most distinctive and most atmospheric trailers, for a film whose production difficulties prevented it from fully delivering on its considerable promise. The New Mutants is a flawed but genuinely interesting attempt to bring horror sensibilities to the superhero genre, and this trailer captures its gothic ambitions and its psychological register with a confidence that makes it one of the more memorable pieces of superhero franchise marketing from its era. Boone promised something the genre had not previously attempted. The trailer made that feel worth wanting. The film revealed that the ambition survived the difficulties more intact than its reputation suggests.