SAN DIEGO — While most comic book movies play it safe, the upcoming Ghost Rider film looks dangerous as hell.

Explosive footage of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, screened Friday in Hall H during Sony’s panel at Comic-Con International, bristled with manic energy and a demonic menace well-suited to the Marvel Comics character, a cursed motorcycle stunt rider who turns into a bony hellion.

“Ghost Rider is, we think, one of the most badass characters of all time,” said co-director Brian Taylor during the panel. “I mean, he makes absolutely no sense at all…. There’s no logic to it — it’s just pure nightmare.”

During the Comic-Con footage, the massive Hall H rumbled with guttural roars and revving engines, as extreme action filled the screen. At the center of it all was an unbelievably fiery and ferocious Ghost Rider, with his powerful Hell Cycle, flailing chain and waves of hellfire — oh, the hellfire.

Flames danced on Ghost Rider’s skull, trailed from his wicked bike, spewed from his mouth and basically befouled everything, like some kind of infernal bukkake scene. (He even pissed fire.)

Extreme close-ups, stark high-def imagery and pounding audio gave the footage an astonishing presence somewhere between horror movie, Kiss concert and fever dream.

After The Dark Knight, almost everybody involved in making a superhero movie gave lip service to “going dark” with their projects.

While Kick-Ass kicked the genre in the teeth, most superhero flicks hew to Iron Man’s path to box office success: Introduce a relatable hero, mix in some humor, add a little romance and bring on the supervillain smackdown at the end.

For Ghost Rider, that formula doesn’t really work. The 2007 Ghost Rider movie came out more like a Grimm’s fairy tale, something for kids to watch with their families, said star Nicolas Cage, who reprises his role as cursed biker Johnny Blaze in Spirit of Vengeance. Rising from the ashes of that critically panned film, Cage and his new directors are taking Ghost Rider in an entirely new direction — basically straight to hell.

It’s an appropriate choice for a character, hatched in 1972 by writers Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog for Marvel Comics, that’s more demonic than your average pulp creation.

He’s scary — he’s not really a superhero…. He doesn’t wear tights, he doesn’t have, like, you know, invisibility power,” co-director Taylor said. “His power is, he sucks out your soul. Like that’s the Ghost Rider’s superpower. That’s insane — it’s totally insane.”

Cage embraced the amped-up take on the Ghost Rider character, whose powers include the Penance Stare, the ultimate crazy-eyes look that causes those who receive it to relive past sins. (Could there be a superpower more befitting Cage, who truly shines when brings the crazy?) Clearly relishing Spirit of Vengeance’s horrifying tone, Cage said it fits with the character’s evolution since the last film.

“Johnny Blaze has been living for several years now having had his head catch on fire, so it’s had a little bit of an effect on his mood,” Cage deadpanned. “In the first movie, he was kind of an innocent goofball — he was keeping the ignition at bay. This one, he’s been living with it for several years and it certainly has made him a bit more sarcastic, a bit more edgy [and] ironic.”

There’s possibly no directing team more capable of capturing that edginess and insanity than Taylor and his partner Mark Neveldine, who work under the name Neveldine/Taylor. Spirit of Vengeance’s hellacious tone benefits greatly from the DIY drive of the daredevil directing duo, known for their hilariously vulgar and high-energy Crank movies — and for their innovative and risky filming methods.

An outrageous behind-the-scenes reel screened at Comic-Con showed off Neveldine and Taylor’s utterly unorthodox style, with the daredevil directors riding on rollerblades, hanging off the backs of motorcycles and dangling from wires over steep cliffs while clutching cameras to capture death-defying footage.

Their stated goal is to capture as much in-camera as humanly possible, then use CGI to enhance the imagery rather than relying on digital creations, which can lead to the lifeless, sterile feel of the first Ghost Rider film.

“Mark and Brian are both very camera-oriented,” said Cage, who called the directors extremists. “They both operate, they both know where to put the camera,” he said. “And the way Mark Neveldine shoots, he really risks his life.”

Cage and co-stars Idris Elba (who plays drunken monk Moreau) and Johnny Whitworth (as key villain Blackout) performed many stunts themselves. It’s part of the Neveldine/Taylor playbook — taking risks to capture the most intense visuals possible, sometimes at a physical cost to the actors and stuntmen.

‘You will see real bones breaking in Ghost Rider. Not CG bones — real bones.’

“You will see real bones breaking in Ghost Rider,” said Taylor. “Not CG bones — real bones.”

Who knows if Neveldine/Taylor can fill a couple hours of screen time with the kind of adrenaline-fueled fiery mayhem they blasted at the Comic-Con crowd Friday. But one thing’s certain: Spirit of Vengeance will take the comic book movie genre to new extremes.

It’s about time, according to Cage, an avowed comics fan who’s followed Ghost Rider for years.

“I always appreciated the monsters more,” Cage said. “I felt for them. I liked their complexity. In a day and age where we’re making comic book movies all the time, and all the superheroes are pretty much really good guys, you need to have a couple bad boys in there, too. And Ghost Rider provides that.”

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is slated to open Feb. 17, 2012.