In August 2002, M. Night Shyamalan received the most unexpected death knell of his career: Newsweek declared him “The Next Spielberg.” It’s a label that’s been haunting the Sixth Sense director ever since. Worse than simply being known as the “twists guy,” Newsweek’s hollow comparison built an expectation that Shyamalan could deliver the same four-quadrant blockbuster thrills as Steven Spielberg. Instead, the director of Sixth Sense and Signs went on to embrace a kind of hokey, B-movie sensibility you’ll almost never find in a Spielberg picture. Shyamalan’s latest film, Trap, is the purest embodiment of that difference.

Like many Shyamalan movies before it, the premise of Trap is the basis of its appeal. A serial killer known as The Butcher (Josh Hartnett) attends a pop star concert with his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) only to find that it’s an elaborate trap set up by the FBI. It’s the kind of pulpy thriller that you might find on cable TV or among forgotten VOD releases that your favorite actor did in the ‘90s. When the premise is all you need to know about the movie — it’s a cat-and-mouse thriller, but you’re rooting for the cat! — you know you’re in for some simple, visceral thrills. And that’s exactly what Shyamalan delivers.

Pyro is back. In the most self-aware Marvel movie of all time, one X-Men character who defined a generation of angsty mutants has undergone a big transformation. Eighteen years after his final appearance as John “Pyro” Allerdyce in X-Men: The Last Stand, Aaron Stanford returns to the X-Men universe — and joins the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too — in Deadpool & Wolverine. But for Stanford, this return wasn’t exactly a homecoming. It was something new.

“This is a different, very different version of Pyro than the old X-Men movies,” Stanford tells Inverse.

In the blood-soaked aftermath of Deadpool & Wolverine, we caught up with the super-talented and prolific Stanford to discussed Pyro’s fate in the movie, why this is a different character on some level from the one we first met in X2: X-Men United, and what the new movie’s ending means for the future of his iconic Mutant.