While attending the Fox panel at this year’s CCXP (Comic-Con Experience) in Sao Paulo, Brazil, The New Mutants director Josh Boone, Alice Braga (Dr. Cecilia Reyes), writer Knate Lee, Henry Zaga (Sunspot), and artist Bill Sienkiewicz shared some new information about the much-anticipated movie during their Q&A with Erico Borgo from Omelete.

As you’ve now seen in the great-looking first trailer, New Mutants is a completely different kind of X-Men movie, and it’s certainly following the path Fox set up with Deadpool and Logan in that it breaks the mold. But unlike the films I just mentioned and all the other comic book movies that have come before, New Mutants is a horror movie that happens to star mutants. Which is why I’m so excited for this movie.

Previously Boone offered up some details about New Mutants including how he pitched it as a trilogy:

“We brought it to Fox as a trilogy of films, really all based on that long run by [Bill] Sienkiewicz, and kind of incorporates some stuff from later issues in the ’80s. These are all going to be horror movies, and they’re all be their own distinct kind of horror movies. This is certainly the ‘rubber-reality’ supernatural horror movie. The next one will be a completely different kind of horror movie. Our take was just go examine the horror genre through comic book movies and make each one its own distinct sort of horror film. Drawing from the big events that we love in the comics.”

Boone says he was inspired by films, books, and a very specific run of the New Mutants comics:

“Our whole pitch for this series was based on Bill Sienkiewicz run with Chris Claremont [The New Mutants vol. 1 #18–31, 35–38], so it’s very much when New Mutants became dark and surreal and more horror driven. We were incredibly inspired by the Demon Bear story which is probably the best, well-known New Mutants story. We also drew on movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Stephen King stuff, and even Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.”

Also, Stacey Snider, chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox, has previously talked about New Mutants and what fans can expect:

“New Mutants is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It’s like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they’re dangerous. The only solution is to put them in a Breakfast Club detention/Cuckoo’s Nest institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it’s strange and combustible inside. The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven’t seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like The Shining than “we’re teenagers let’s save the world.”

During the panel at CCXP, Boone and the rest of the panelists revealed a bit more about the movie, including how they are thinking about filming the sequel in Brazil and wanting the film to be grounded and realistic. Check out some of the highlights below.

New Mutants opens in theaters on April 13, 2018 and also stars Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) as Wolfsbane, Anya Taylor-Joy (Split) as Magik, Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) as Cannonball, and Blu Hunt as Mirage.

Boone talked about how the comics dictated the movie. The film had to be a horror movie that happened to have superheroes inside of it.