New Mutants Clip Shows Off The Movie’s Jump-Scare Horror

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A New Mutants clip gives a taste of the movie's terrifying jump-scare horror. After numerous delays, the long-awaited New Mutants movie is finally making its way to screens. Hollywood is certainly hoping the X-Men spinoff following a younger generation of mutants will coax fans back to theaters as the movie business tries to recover from the long coronavirus shutdown.

Directed by Josh Boone, New Mutants definitely offers something a little different for audiences who are mostly familiar with X-Men from the long-running movie franchise. Horror is in fact the name of the game for this version of the comic book, specifically ‘90s horror, which was clearly a big influence on Boone’s vision. The movie stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Alice Braga, Blu Hunt and Henry Zaga.

The horror angle on New Mutants is indeed getting heavy emphasis in marketing leading up to the release, as evidenced by a newly released clip from 20th Century Studios that could have come straight from a Slender Man movie. See the terrifying video in the space below:

In the clip, Taylor-Joy’s Illyana Rasputina, Williams’ Rahne Sinclair and Heaton’s Sam Guthrie are just hanging out playing with coloring books and puppets when they hear a creepy song playing somewhere nearby. Recognizing the eerie tune, Ilyana leads the way down a corridor where supernatural manifestations begin appearing. Inside a room, she and Guthrie discover a terrified girl cowering in bed, apparently a vision of Illyana herself at a younger age. A tall, slender monster suddenly appears over the girl, and when he whirls around he’s wearing a bizarre smiley mask that he tears off to reveal a horrifying melted monster face with puckered pink spots for eyes. This is in fact one of the movie’s villains the Smiley Men, who look like what might happen if you crossed the Slender Man with Venom.

Indeed, it was previously revealed that the Smiley Men are villains from Illyana’s past that are conjured by her fellow mutant Dani Moonstar, whose psychic powers are running somewhat out of control. It’s easy to see from this clip how the Smiley Men lend themselves to horror, and it will be interesting to see how the New Mutants go about defeating this enemy in the film. It will be even more interesting to see if audiences are willing to head to theaters amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic to see a new X-Men movie after the last one, Dark Phoenix, was a major flop at the box office. After so many reports about reshoots and other problems on New Mutants, not to mention all the release delays, there’s definitely reason to worry that the horror approach may not work for the comic book franchise and that there could be more box office disappointment in the offing for the X-Men universe.