The Walt Disney Company is so large and encompasses so many characters and franchises that it seems impossible to define a “Disney fan” these days. Sitting in the Honda Arena during this year’s D23 fan convention in Anaheim, California, I wondered what the makeup of the audience was. How many of them were Marvel fans? How many of them worshipped at the altar of Star Wars? Did some of them still pledge allegiance to good old Disney animation and appreciate Pixar in a similar way? And, of course, were there people who just loved all of the above?

I consider myself a pretty big fan of many of the characters and worlds that inhabit the Disney bubble, but I’m also quite capable of dismissing things that just aren’t for me. So as the evening’s two-hour Disney Experiences Showcase panel entered its third hour, I found myself vacillating between paying 100% attention to what was on screen and knowing when to take a breather (and in the case of the first few scenes of Snow White, when to recoil in horror).

But then something unexpected happened. A film series that I don’t like at all captured my undivided attention. The first footage from Tron: Ares was shown exclusively to the D23 audience and… well, I was captivated by what was shown.

I don’t like the original Tron. It looks gorgeous but is pretty boring. I don’t like the decades-later sequel Tron: Legacy. It looks gorgeous but is, er, pretty boring. And still! Ares looks so different, so off-kilter and so unexpected in its tone and vision that I left the panel thinking about it and only that. Hell, I was convinced before it was revealed that the seat-shaking soundtrack was the work of Nine Inch Nails, a group that once wouldn’t even be within respectable distance of a Disney stage.

The film’s crazy premise was revealed before the footage, setting the tone: What if a warlord named Ares (played by Jared Leto) from the computer world Tron finds a way to invade the human plane and decides to conquer our world and remake it in his own image? We were told the footage wasn’t ready yet, but honestly I couldn’t tell. What was projected immediately caught my attention.

Director Joachim Rønning seems to be creating a horror movie atmosphere with Ares, flooding the screen with eerie reds and blacks, relying on imagery that could be described as gothic horror if it weren’t so clearly sci-fi. The tone of the footage is more reminiscent of an alien invasion film than a pop sci-fi adventure, and the images of the Tron Grid invading the human world are portrayed as dominating and overwhelming rather than awe-inspiring. If the footage matches the tone of the actual film and isn’t just a sentiment invented by a talented editor, it certainly looks like this is going to be a frightening, oppressive experience. In a good way, of course. The dread that permeates the entire footage and its downright apocalyptic vision of a world completely changed by a nightmare from another dimension reminded me of Blade Runner in its sheer dystopian scale.

Yes, there’s also a shot where a light bike slices a police car in half during a thrilling chase, but the action didn’t stick with me as much as the atmospheric moments, like a lone hoverbike cruising across a calm ocean while the sky is filled with Grid vehicles and structures, all of which cast the sky an ominous red.

Is it possible that this horror footage is a bait and switch, or at least not a completely accurate representation of the finished film? Of course! It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. But the recent revelation that the film’s music is being composed by alternative rock band Nine Inch Nails felt like a strange confirmation that the menace dripping from every frame was intentional. You don’t bring in Trent Reznor to do something sonically uplifting—you bring him in when you want to feel panic in your bones as the skin rattles against your body. For now, I can only assume that Tron: Ares is intended to be a more disturbing, unsettling experience than the previous films in the series, a sharp left turn into something more horror-flavored.

And honestly, that’s the kind of decision that can make me, who’s very agnostic about Tron in general, genuinely curious about what the finished film will feel like. I’d love nothing more than to love a Tron movie, and with this first footage, the film has shown its wackiest side.

I talked in depth about my experience at D23 on today’s episode of /Film Daily, which you can listen to in the player below:

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