Todd McFarlane wants Hollywood to get it through their heads that his Spawn reboot is a hard R scary film and not a superhero movie. "If you think about it as a horror [film] it makes complete sense. if you think about it as Captain America it falls apart," McFarlane told IGN during an interview Saturday at New York Comic Con.

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McFarlane is writing, producing and directing Spawn, which also has Get Out and Halloween's Jason Blum aboard as a producer and The Walking Dead's Greg Nicotero designing the creature costume for the title character. The film has cast Oscar winner Jamie Foxx in the title role opposite Jeremy Renner . McFarlane vented his frustration with Hollywood execs who he claims have had trouble getting what his Spawn script is going for."Here's what I'm trying to get Hollywood to understand because they still don't quite get it is I want to do a dead serious, scary movie that happens to be a superhero, right? And so they keep tripping into this superhero part and I wish I could almost take that piece out of it," McFarlane said."But I just saw earlier today, Greg Nicotero showed me some physical pieces of the costume and I'm going, 'That's it.' We've been designing it anyways but I finally got to see it physically and I go, 'That's it.' So next time I go into the studios, I'm bringing all that stuff with me because, obviously, I didn't do a good enough job in the script to convey that. They're reading words in my script that are way different than what i see in my head and I just want to scare people. I just want to scare people on a serious level."He also clarified his past statements about his Spawn movie being a "creep movie" and pointed to the recent blockbuster success of The Nun as an example of a film where the title character can be scary, selectively seen, and largely silent."We just saw one a couple weeks ago called [The] Nun. It's called Nun She's not onscreen the most and she really doesn't talk a whole heck of a lot, right? I mean, these kinds of movies have been done forever. I'm just saying that in a movie like Jaws, it's called Jaws but the shark isn't onscreen talking and whenever the Hollywood studios say, 'How can you not have the lead character not talk?,' you and I can stand here and come up with a hundred movies that have done this in the last twenty years. And you don't even have to go back the last twenty years because there's one two weeks ago called The Nun and The Nun did it, right?""So get your Nun hat on. Get your Aliens hat on, get your John Carpenter's The Thing, get your Jaws hat on. The Grudge, The Ring, get that hat on [and] my script makes sense. You put Captain America, Hulk on? It reads funny."McFarlane also reminded us that since he owns the character and rights to Spawn, he doesn't have to be preoccupied with concerns such as licensing and merchandising that studios get hung up on when they hear the words comic book movie. Because to McFarlane, this isn't a superhero film. Spawn is a horror movie. And a very, very dark one if he has his way."I'm not a giant corporation. I don't have to sell t-shirts and hats and all this ancillary stuff and do it, right? So my frustration a little bit is when I go into Hollywood and I go oh we're gonna do our dark superhero movie -- I haven't seen it. I get it. There have been a couple of R-rated movies out there. They even teased us a little bit with Venom before they went to PG-13. But they're not going to go dark in my definition of dark or Jason Blum's definition of dark or Greg Nicotero of Walking Dead's definition of dark."He continued, "Their dark is here's PG-13, here's R, they go over a little bit. We're talking over here. We're talking that it would make your kids cry. If you're going to do dark R, make the children cry who are under 10. That's the movie. Do I think that The Joker is gonna make 10-year-olds cry? Nope. Would I make them cry? Sure, I would because I'd be doing a movie for adults."For more of Todd McFarlane at NYCC, check out what he had to tell us about his company McFarlane Toys bringing back Movie Maniacs and Tortured Souls and making action figures based on Fortnite Max Scoville contributed to this report.