George R.R. Martin's Nightflyers Gets First Trailer at San Diego Comic-Con 2018

At San Diego Comic-Con 2018, we got a first full-length trailer for sci-fi psychological thriller Nightflyers, based on George R.R. Martin's 1980 novella. Set in 2093, the series follows a group of eight explorers on the spaceship The Nightflyer, who are trying to save Earth from destruction. Nightflyers is a co-production between Syfy and Netflix.

The new Nightflyers trailer explains that the spaceship is humanity's only hope, but a malfunction during launch kills a few and puts the rest of the crew in danger, as they are forced to grapple with a series of horrors. One character believes "something [is] wrong with this ship", with another warning not to bring it "back to Earth".

Martin, best known as the author behind Game of Thrones, is as an executive producer on Nightflyers. He previously described the show as Alfred Hitchcock's "Pyscho [but] in space", basically like “a haunted house story on a starship". Though Martin wasn't present at Comic-Con to discuss the show, he did appear via a prerecorded video to introduce a first look.

Gretchen Mol, Eoin Macken, David Ajala, Sam Strike, Maya Eshet, Angus Sampson, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Brían F. O’Byrne star. Jeff Buhler served as head writer and showrunner after Daniel Cerone's exit.

Nightflyers improves on the previous adaptation, the 1987 film, in casting actors that fit the ethnicity of the characters in the novella. And though it uses the framework of Martin's written work, it has a different setting.

“Instead of going with the 1000-world universe created by Martin, we stepped back a little from the complexity of that world to create a story that takes place 75 years in our own future so that everything feels very realist,” Buhler said during the Comic-Con panel.

Nightflyers will premiere in the autumn, on Syfy in the US and Netflix in India and the rest of the world.