Mimicking the mysterious, Statue of Liberty decapitating, first-Transformers-movie-prefacing deployment of the initial trailer for Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams has once again slipped a teaser for one of his movies in front of a big-budget Michael Bay hit. This time, the video—which shows Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman, apparently cohabitating peacefully in an underground bunker until things go horribly wrong—was pushed out ahead of Bay’s 13 Hours, with pretty much no advance warning. Oh, and it’s apparently called 10 Cloverfield Lane.
Before we all completely freak out, though, let’s make a couple things clear. First: this probably isn’t a direct sequel to Abrams’ 2008 Godzilla-at-ground-level success, with the producer and Force Awakens director releasing a statement earlier tonight that referred to the new movie as a “blood relative” of Cloverfield (whatever that ambiguous familiar relationship actually means). Also, this almost certainly isn’t a new project, arriving out of the blue; rather, it looks like Abrams’ Bad Robot has changed the name of director Dan Trachtenberg’s Valencia, which Goodman signed on for back in 2014, and which Winstead talked about filming last year. It’s not entirely clear why the name was changed, although people are suggesting Cloverfield might become a sort of anthology franchise for Bad Robot’s periodic turns toward mystery and horror.
Not that any of that makes the trailer itself less chilling. Depicting Winstead as a young woman who wakes up after a car crash in the bunker of a stranger (Goodman), who tells her something terrible has happened to the world outside, it’s pleasantly tense and claustrophobic, culminating in Winstead’s character staring out of the bunker at some sort of unseen horror. Happily, we won’t have to wait super long to find out what she saw, either; 10 Cloverfield Lane is expected to come out in just two months, on March 11, 2016.