Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children trailer: Meet a different kind of mutant

The concept is a familiar one: eccentric school headmaster takes strange children with weird talents under his or her wing, coaching them and protecting them within the safety of a beautiful mansion. But Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is not exactly X-Men. Although the titular children of Tim Burton’s new film adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ novel possess strange talents (or “peculiarities”) passed down through genes, these powers are more Gothic than superheroic, as the film’s newest trailer demonstrates. Instead of cool laser beam eyes or shapeshifting, one girl has a mouth in the back of her head. Another girl can fly, but has to be tethered down with rope or heavy shoes lest she float away.

All the same, these peculiar children face persecution from the outside world, and from monsters called hollows (Samuel L. Jackson). Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) protects them by keeping them inside a time loop — “a loop preserves the last 24 hours. Reset the loop, and you can stay here forever,” as she explains to Jake (Asa Butterfield), a boy who doesn’t seem peculiar but nevertheless ends up inextricably tied to the school’s fortunes. By the end of the trailer, he’s even shooting squid monsters in the face with a crossbow.

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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is in theaters Sept. 30. Watch the trailer above.