Over the course of a year, I watch a lot of films. Whenever I finish early at school you can find me in the cinema that is literally just across the road, taking a punt on wherever the hype is. Most of the time I go in totally blind to these movies, or at least only knowing the barebones description that you might find when you run the film’s name through Google. More often than not, I make up my mind on what I want to see there and then, maybe one or two minutes before I walk in to the cinema. At this point I have read no reviews and have virtually no idea what I am going to be faced with when the lights go down at this point.
Such was the case for when I went to see ‘Brightburn’, a new film directed by David Yarovesky and starring Elizabeth Banks, David Denman and Jackson Dunn in lead roles. What caught my attention was the label that was being put on it: as superhero / horror. What made the situation all the more hilarious was that, in the description of the film I got when I sent it through Google, it described the superhero / horror fusion as ‘an innovative new genre’. Who knew that you could be labelled as an innovator by simply combining the two most formulaic genres in Hollywood? Sometimes I don’t understand the film industry.
That aside, I thought ‘I’ve got to see this’. I needed to see this ‘innovative new genre’ in action, and, coming out of that experience, it’s a little hard to evaluate whether I enjoyed myself or not, simply because it was so different to what I was expecting. I was expecting a super polished superhero film with a few horror movie conventions: it was the total opposite of that. ‘Brightburn’ is as much as a horror movie as any other that has been released in the past year or so, and, if I’m going to give the film any credit at all, it did a great job of being a horror movie as there were plenty of moment disturbing enough to make me want to look away from the screen briefly, which is generally how I assess the quality of a horror movie.
However, ‘Brightburn’ might be one of the biggest failures in storytelling I have ever watched, and it raises some interesting questions about ambiguity in storytelling and whether it is possible to go too far with it; to what extent can you get away with it, and when does it just become obvious the writers hadno idea what they’re doing. Between plot holes and abandoned character arcs (seriously, what happened to Caitlyn), and a narrative which centres around a twelve-year-old antagonist whose motivations are never discussed properly, just left to linger in empty subtext that adds up to nothing.
And, on top of that, I would hesitate to call any element of ‘Brightburn’ all that innovative at all. It simply takes the cliché of children being placed in challenging situations (only this time the child is an antagonist) and drizzles it in a vague and conventional superhero backstory narrative. And I can’t even begin to stress how much of a problem this is. Brandon (the aforementioned antagonist) just arrives on the doorstep of the Breyer family: so many questions. Where did he come from? What significance does that weird symbol that Brandon draws on everything have? Why did he come to Earth? Where do you draw the line between intentional ambiguity and just plain lazy writing?
Here. I understand that ambiguity can add to the horror of a moment, but there’s that and then there’s sidestepping key plot points that could have added an extra dimension to the film, in favour of watering down your main character as much as possible.
It’s not out yet, but apparently ‘Midsommar’ plays in very similar territory, therefore, I think we need a name for this bizarre sub-genre: ambigu-horror, horror films so devoid of specific detail and so reliant on ambiguous subtext in an attempt to cater to the lowest of low common denominator audiences who want nothing more than to be frightened out of their skins by a horror movie, that the narrative devolves into a total mess.
And, following on from this, what is the possibility of the superhero / ambigu-horror fusion becoming the next big thing in Hollywood? If the quality of ‘Brightburn’ is anything to go by, it’s not a lot, but, despite not loving the film, I do see the potential in a formula like superhero / horror. Say, if it was given to writers with more experience, given a slightly bigger budget to flesh out the scope a little more, and given to a big name studio like Marvel who can inject a more superhero narrative into it, who knows, you might have a half decent film.
Furthermore, I am so fucking sick of superhero films and the hype around them. I get ‘Avengers: Endgame’ had a lot of hype around it because it was the thrilling conclusion to an arc that spans a whole intricate timeline, and the film was indeed good, but there comes a point where the hype seems to overshadow any critical examination of the film, and I find that slightly irritating. However, if fusing horror conventions into the mainstream superhero movie framework can liven up the formula and keep it interesting for longer, I’m all for it.
After all, it’s not the first time this year that the two genres within a certain media that are deemed too formulaic by certain audiences have come together and captured the attention of the mainstream public. It wasn’t that long ago when we used to see those internet memes that said, ‘I listen to everything, except country and rap’. Now look at the song on top of the Billboard Hot 100. A country / rap song. It reminds you that trends can move quickly, and sometimes the most baffling yet calculated of fusions can end up being next big thing.
