Westworld is back with a genuinely unsettling teaser to raise some big questions about the long-awaited second season.

It's been nearly a year since Robert Ford's (Sir Anthony Hopkins) robotic creations raged against the machine, but the show started gearing up for its return with a trailer at Comic-Con International on Saturday (July 22).

preview for Westworld season 2 trailer

There's no dialogue at all, only the eerily appropriate Sammy Davis Jr standard 'I've Gotta Be Me' playing over startling shots of Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) standing over the body of a rotting animal and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in Beast Mode picking off park visitors with her pistol.

However, the most disturbing image comes last as the camera pans towards a smile creeping across the face of the blood-soaked Man in Black (Ed Harris) amidst the modern-day rebellion. Also teased are other worlds within the park, but we only get a brief glimpse.

When we left the theme park in the season one finale, all hell had broken loose as 'hosts' Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) defied their programming and rebelled against human guests.

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Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

A recently-launched promotional website from the second season makes it very clear that trouble will still be afoot when Westworld returns next year with an ever-expanding world.

And lest you think Robert Ford really did meet his violent end as payback for his violent delights at the hands of Dolores, showrunner Jonathan Nolan has already hinted at ways that Sir Anthony Hopkins will continue to appear.

"I think the sacrifice he makes at the end of the first season is very real," the writer insisted. "I think there will be an opportunity to explore a little bit more of the backstory of how this park came to be, a little more of that story.

"We'll see the character's presence will be felt in that sense in terms of filling in a few more of the gaps about the early history of this place."

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Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

But as for actual concrete information about the new episodes, the creative team behind Westworld are very keen to keep you in the dark for now.

His fellow showrunner Lisa Joy is urging fans to stay away from online communities like Reddit, which were able to correctly guess or outright spoil some of the secrets for the first season.

"For us, even though we're creating it as we go along, we feel like we owe it to the fans to be bold and also to play this game with them where we're like, 'Do you want to figure it out? Do you want to play with us here?'," co-creator Joy told.

"Hopefully now, because of the first season, the people who want to have this purist interpretation of the series, they'll just develop their own theories in a vacuum — and maybe don't log on to Reddit."

Westworld returns to HBO and Sky Atlantic in 2018.

From: Digital Spy