By Karl Quinn
Most superhero movies are made for teenage boys, but Brightburn seems tailor-made for an entirely different audience: the parents of teenage boys – difficult teenage boys in particular.
"To me the emotional core of the movie is a story about a mother and a son and their relationship," director David Yarovesky says of his inventive superhero-horror hybrid.
The mother is Tori Breyer (Elizabeth Banks), an artist living in rural Kansas and desperate to have a child with her farmer husband Kyle (David Denman). They have no luck until one night a meteor crashes in the woods nearby and, rushing out to investigate, they find an infant boy inside.
The echo of the Kent family's discovery of the child who would become Superman is deliberate. But here the growing alien seeks not to save the world but to enslave it.
But even as 12-year-old Brendan (Jackson A. Dunn) is coming to realise the power he wields, and the evil ends to which he can put it, his mother refuses to believe anything but the best of her miracle child. And that, says Yarovesky, was what resonated most with him about the script by Brian Gunn – younger brother of Guardians of the Galaxy's James (who produces) – and his cousin Mark.
Director David Yarovesky (centre) and executive producer James Gunn (sitting) on the set of Brightburn.Credit: Boris Martin
"The whole world thought there was something wrong with this kid, but Tori stood up for him, saying, 'No, he's special, he's here for a reason' – I saw those words and I related to them," he says. "It felt like what my Mom used to do for me.
"I was a kid who grew up loving horror movies and wearing Freddie Krueger T-shirts to school and covering my neighbours in fake blood and shooting little scenes with them, and everyone thought I was a weirdo, and my Mom was like, 'No, he's creative'.
"I really connected with this on a deep level," he adds. "It really is a love note, a thank-you note to my Mom, because I probably wouldn't be here talking to you now if she hadn't been so supportive."
Any parent who has raised, or even known, a difficult child will find plenty to identify with in Brightburn, which you could easily read as an allegorical tale about the Freudian journey of a boy into adulthood via turbulent puberty, and the painful but necessary cleaving away from his parents – and his mother in particular. But for genre fans, it ticks plenty of boxes too.
Jackson A. Dunn as Brandon Breyer in Brightburn.Credit: Boris Martin
"The goal was to take on tropes from horror and superhero movies and sort of break your mind on them," Yarovesky says.
Twisting the set-up of Superman and asking what if the alien used his powers for evil rather than good was key to that. "I wanted to take things that were dear to all of us and play the heartstrings a little bit and then turn it against us," he says. "The same way that It makes clowns scary, I wanted to take something that we all felt safe with as a child and turn it into something scary."
Brightburn isn't the first movie to explore the dark side of superpowers – Venom and Hulk go there in more conventional form, for instance – but Yarovesky and his co-creators believe they've fashioned something unique by essentially making a character with superpowers the villain of a horror film.
"I think whether a movie is horror or not depends on the point-of-view of the character that you're telling it through," he contends. "In the case of this movie, we're telling the story through the POV of people who are running for their lives and screaming – so in that sense it's a horror movie. That is the fun of the movie – if superpowers were turned on us, how scary and terrifying would that be."
He's a good boy, really: Tori Breyer (Elizabeth Banks) realises too late the truth about what her son has become.Credit: Boris Martin
The fun in making the movie, he reveals, came from multiple sources: doing it more or less on the sly and dropping a trailer with little warning last December; working with a bunch of friends (including the Gunn boys and Yarovesky's wife, costume designer Autumn Steed); and making the tight $US7 million budget stretch by focusing on anticipation of horror and gore more than its depiction (that said, there are some truly gruesome scenes).
And in a strange way, it was all rather like those early days, when his mother was forced to defend her "creative" son from the critical gaze of their neighbours.
"The truth is that not much has ever changed in my life," Yarovesky says. "I run into people from my childhood and they say, 'What's new?' And I realise nothing.
"I'm still just making weird little scary movies – but instead of scaring people on my block, I'm trying to scare the whole world."
Brightburn is in cinemas now.
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