Wendell & Wild’s first trailer aims for pure Coraline-style horror

This is the first trailer Wendell & WildThe latest animated stop motion adventure is now available. Coraline Christmas Nightmare director Henry Selick, focuses on the movie’s eerie horror aspects above everything else. On Oct. 28, the movie will be available on Netflix. The title characters are Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele, along with Peele, who is a coproducer. (As Polygon learned during a set visit earlier this year, producing the movie brought Peele some anxiety, since he and Selick were pitching it to studios around the time Peele’s directorial debut You must get out was releasing — and Peele thought You must get outMight flop or torpedo Wendell & Wild entirely.)

Polygon had a chance to preview the first 30 minutes of the movie earlier this year, and it certainly doesn’t start off like a horror movie. The focus is on 13-year-old Kat (Lyric Ross), an angry orphan who’s being released from the juvenile justice system into a Catholic school in her old hometown. Two demon brothers, Wendell (Key) and Wild (Peele), discover she’s a “Hell Maiden” who can summon demons to the mortal realm, and they hatch a scheme to get her to help them escape from the tiny hell prison they live in, built atop the giant rotund stomach of a 300-foot-tall demon named Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). Starring are Natalie Martinez, James Hong and Angela Bassett.

Like Selick’s other projects, including the live-action/stop-motion hybrids James and The Giant Peach And Monkeybone, Wendell & Wild also has its comic side, but it’s a macabre, eerie kind of comedy. In a recent interview about the upcoming film, Selick told Polygon that while the film has horror elements, he doesn’t consider it primarily a horror movie. “A few of the things I don’t want to do: I don’t want to do strong horror,” he says. “I hate slasher films. Realistic horror is what I loathe. However, I do love realistic horror. DoLike scary stuff. Und [this movie] can be pretty damn scary.”