Make-up maestro Rick Baker, Emily Blunt, wolfman-even-without-makeup Benicio Del Toro dropped into the San Diego Comic Com for a short presentation on The Wolfman, a film I’ve been rather indifferent about. Two surprises came from the panel: Baker told (demanded?) Universal that he had to be the make-up man on this flick and The Wolfman appears to be R-rated (Baker couldn’t confirm that, but the footage had guts, literally).

As for the footage, well it looks damn atmospheric, placing the gothic 19th century setting front and center. Plenty of shadow-drenched shots and silhouettes and a very muted color palette. A raspy narrator–who turns out to be some old coot in the film–speaks of a savage event 25 years in the past his father witnessed. This is where we get the hard-R image of a halved corpse with his intestines splattered out on the ground.

Afterwards, the footage delivers some dark, split-second shots of a werewolf rampaging in the woods before it starts to explain some of the relationships in the movie (Blunt is the love interest, Anthony Hopkins plays Del Toro’s father, and Hugo Weaving wields a gun and appears to be trying to send Del Toro to the taxidermist). Then it shows a bloody Del Toro standing in front of Hopkins, who delivers a fantastic line: “You’ve done terrible things.”

For the most part, the footage kept the money shots of “The Wolfman” under wraps– with the exception of his claws, lots and lots of close ups of the claws. Although we do get a nifty bit of the werewolf tossing someone out a window and nearing-transformation Del Toro screaming, “I will kill all of you!” Bad ass. The longest moment of the werewolf footage is a dark profile shot of the “The Wolfman” getting all up in some dying, petrified dude’s face at the end of the trailer.

Personally, I’m rather keyed-up for this flick now. Something I haven’t been able to say since Mark Romanek was attached as the director.