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Kraven the Hunter was in the house at NYCC, with director JC Chandor and star Aaron Taylor-Johnson debuting the opening seven minutes plus another action sequence.

Taylor-Johnson’s presence at the con was a big reveal. He came on stage very much looking the part, with a worn leather coat with furry lining and a gold chain sporting an animal’s tooth. And before taking a group shot with what turned out to be dozens of Kraven cosplayers in the audience, host Josh Horowitz asked him about comments he had previously made that Kraven was “an animal lover and a protector of the natural world.” “He’s obviously the world’s greatest hunter, lethal in all ways, I don’t know, do those things go along with conservationist?”

“I think I was probably taken a little out of context,” the Kick-Ass star replied. “Like all great hunters, Kraven respects his prey and he respects the natural order. He’s an apex predator, top of the food chain. Kraven’s a hunter, not a poacher, and like every hunter knows, sometimes you have to cull the herd to preserve order.”

(Culling the herd is, in fact, a principle of animal conservation, though it is a controversial one in some quarters. Hunting and killing one of every kind of animal, a foundational principle of comic-book-Kraven that may not be true at all of movie-Kraven, is very much not not.)

“Of course, once he starts applying that to human beings,” Taylor-Johnson noted, “That’s when it becomes a pretty dark story.” Based on the footage that followed, which includes Kraven applying a bear trap to a soldier’s cranium, among other very violent things that had the audience screaming in shock, this story will get dark, indeed!

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