Dear Writers: Brightburn does what the Snyderverse couldn’t (how to make sure your genre mashup doesn’t suck)
For his first magic trick, James Gunn showed Marvel how it was done with Guardians of the Galaxy. For his next trick, he showed DC how it was done with The Suicide Squad. But for a piece of horror that will take your breath away, he let his brother Sean perform the prestige.
Brightbburn. The movie is a superhero/horror movie mashup like no other. From the film commentary, Sean Gunn (brother of James Gunn) says when they first shot the movie, it was primarily as a horror movie from the POV of the parents. Their son Brandon — this story’s stand-in for Clark Kent — stayed in the background as a mysterious horror figure we knew would terrorize us.
The plan, Gunn says, was not to appeal for Brandon’s soul. We’d know he is the terror from the beginning. Every time we encounter a jump scare, a moment of potential or actual violence, we intuitively — we EMOTIONALLY — understand that Brandon is the source of that terror. By the end of the movie, Brandon will be the ULTIMATE terror.
But that’s clearly not the movie we got. The movie we got is a lot more nuanced. Complex. It’s not just a horror movie. It’s a superhero movie mashed up with a horror movie, and that changes what you can show on the screen if for no other reason than audiences can only hold so much information at once.
LIMITED EMOTIONAL RESOURCES
Why are genre mashups so hard? Because readers perceive a story with limited mental and emotional resources. And because Gunn is mashing the genres together, we won’t know until the end whether he’s fulfilling or subverting our expectations.
SEE ALSO: WHAT KIND OF THRILLER ARE YOU WRITING?
Because a superhero movie is ultimately about victory. Even if it’s hard won, or maybe because it’s hard won, the audience leaves feeling like an impossible victory might finally be within reach.
Which is partly why the DCEU movies tend to drop with the grace of a planet-killer asteroid. The best DC stories make the audience aspire to a heroic ideal. The worst DCEU movies insist Wonder Woman probably stole those cool shoes from Foot Locker.
“It’s a cool point of view to be like, ‘My heroes are still innocent. My heroes didn’t fucking lie to America. My heroes didn’t embezzle money from their corporations. My heroes didn’t commit any atrocities.’ That’s cool. But you’re living in a fucking dream world.” — Zack Snyder
I mean yes, we absolutely want to see an evil Superman. But not an evil Superman who shows us there’s no difference between good and evil. Not one who kills and lies and betrays (and ****s?!) because hey kid, that’s the real world.
The audience NEEDS Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman to fulfill an ideal of heroism. We don’t just expect them to — we know they will in the end. We show up to see what new obstacles will make that experience of heroism feel more significant than last time.
The experience shifts, however, into something different when we’ve never met the main character before. The genre might tell us what kind of ending to expect, sure, but not how we’ll get there. And that is where Sean Gunn does what Snyder could not.
SUPERHEROES DON’T BREAK NECKS (JUST LEGS)
In a superhero story, we’ll end feeling like good overcame evil. In a horror story, we’ll end feeling like evil overcame good. No matter how hard we fight, it was always going to.
Brightburn was marketed as a horror movie. I think that’s clear from the poster. They wanted you to feel unnverved. Scared. Maybe even disturbed.
But just as we don’t necessarily know who is a superhero or how that good character will ultimately find victory, knowing Brightburn is a horror movie doesn’t tell us whether Brandon is evil.
CLARK KENT WOULD NEVER…!
One scene in particular shows how expertly Gunn plays with our question of whether Brandon is the evil — or whether he will ultimately confront and be defeated by it.
In this scene, Brandon terrorizes a girl by floating outside of her window. We know this is what happened by the end of the movie, but let’s look both at how the scene was shot, how the director originally shot it, and what we eventually got.
The original scene was a horror scene. In the director’s commentary, Sean says he thought he needed to focus on traditional horror beats. He needed to go through the house with each character, focus on the question of whether someone was outside, the increasing terror, the knowledge that there’s probably a ghost or…!
But the scene ended up being a lot shorter. It lingers just long enough for us to experience that at some point, Sean Gunn figured out how to mix the superhero genre with the horror genre.
ON TO THE SCARY SHIT
Part of the suspense is not just in wondering whether Brandon is doing this, but in tracking him as a character. His arc. His motivation. Whether he really is a good person caught in a horror movie, or whether HE is the horror.
Similar to The Boys, Brightburn tempts us with the question of how infinite power would corrupt a human mind. We’re brought into the movie wondering, well, if Clark Kent really had those powers, would he grow up to be a good person? Or would they corrupt him?
That’s the question of a superhero movie. With great power comes great responsibility, but what happens if we don’t take responsibility? What if that power corrupts us?
Is Brandon outside her window? Probably. Is it insidious? Evil? Or is it a chance for Brandon to see and fight against the horror growing inside him?
THE BIG TWIST
Horror movies are about survival. Even if you get out, you’re faced with the terrible cost of survival. The difference between a thriller and a horror story tends to be that for a thriller story, it all feels worth it. But in a horror, the things our survival cost us make us regret what it took to stay alive.
Korean horror gets this right so well. You cannot defeat the horror. It will always win. But what makes that especially SCARY is that we worry for the humans at the heart of the story.
And that question — whether there is a human at the heart of Brightburn — is what ends up being incredibly compelling.
SEE ALSO: STRONG OPENING WITH STRANGER THINGS
We’re not just worried for the safety of humanity or even Brandon’s parents. We’re worried for BRANDON. We’re worried for his humanity. For the chance that he might be a good person fighting an evil force — but the risk that the evil force might be HIM.
The entire story, we know he has potentially infinite power. The question is whether his mom can appeal to enough of his humanity that he won’t destroy us.
