Moon Knight Creative Team Explains How the Show's Darker Tone Is Pushed by Character Story

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the series premiere of Marvel's Moon Knight. Read at your own risk!] 

About three-fourths into the first episode of Moon Knight, the latest superhero project to land on Disney+, Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) tries to escape his alter ego, Marc Spector, who has confronted him in his own apartment. However, when Steven tries to escape his building, his elevator takes him to the next floor where a terrifying creature with a beaked nose and frayed flowing robes and a scythe are blocking the path to freedom. It looks like a scene straight out of a horror movie and is perhaps the scariest thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe has put on screen after more than a decade of film and now its fifth TV show. 

"There was a conversation that this is the MCU and everything that we create has to blend at the end. But I was given green lights that we want to do this differently," series director Mohammed Diab told TV Guide. "And I kept pushing the envelope as much as I can until today, a lot of people tell us, it feels like if you took [out] the Marvel logo, you wouldn't know it's a Marvel show. Which is something that we're so proud of." 

It's not just the horror aspects where Moon Knight goes above and beyond. At one point in the premiere, Steven wakes up in a foreign country with a dislocated jaw and a blood-filled mouth. The camera does a close-up on Isaac's face as the character snaps his jaw back into place. It is not for those with a weak stomach, and it is somehow more intimately gruesome than Captain America (Wyatt Russell) bashing in a guy's face with his shield in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. 

While Marvel properties have always had elements of violence — hello, superheroes beating each other up — the MCU has rarely ventured into the territory of gruesome for fear of stepping out of the almost all-inclusive PG-13 comfort zone that allows the movies and TV shows to be seen by the widest possible audience. Though Moon Knight still doesn't hit the bloodshed or bone-crunching levels of the Netflix Marvel series (which now live on Disney+ behind parental controls), the new series shows right away that isn't afraid to explore the dark side of Steven's psyche or push the envelope when it comes to telling this story. 

Moon Knight's Ethan Hawke Breaks Down That Disturbing Opening Scene

However, the creative team maintains that if the story takes darker turns, it is in service of showing the audience who the hero is with all of his different faces.

"A lot of how far we went with the show on screen is really how far the character goes on the page. This is a Disney+ offering, but the aspect we always leaned into more than anything, whether it was spooky, action, adventure, or anything, it was really, this is a character study," executive producer Grant Curtis explained. "This is a character study about Mark Spector and Steven Grant. And then what are the aspects that branch off from that? So it really wasn't about, what's the best horror aspect to tell? It's what aspects naturally flow into the best character study and character story we can tell."

Marvel Studios seems to be game with letting the series showcase a side of the MCU we haven't seen before, exploring themes of mental health and extremist religion and being unafraid to be graphic in those representations. According to Diab, it helped to have an A-list cast in line with the creative team about wanting to do something different and tell a story that hasn't been seen in this universe before. 

"I think Oscar was a big ally, Sarah [Goher], my wife who pitched with me through the project was a partner. Ethan [Hawke], May [Calamawy], Grant Curtis, the Marvel executives and definitely the writers, all of us, we wanted to do something different," the director said. "And Ethan, May, and Oscar didn't want to be here to put on the cape and have figurines. They wanted to do something special, something different, something that they can be proud of, not just making money." 

While we've only seen one episode of the new superhero series so far, the tone sets up an intriguing proposition for the rest of the journey. 

New episodes of Moon Knight drop every Wednesday on Disney+. 

Additional reporting by Kat Moon.