This Superhero Horror Film Predicted How Comic Book Movies Needed To Change

Directed by David Yarovesky, from a script written by Brian and Mark Gunn, Brightburn arrived in a year jam-packed with superhero movies.

It had to contend with Captain Marvel, Glass, Shazam!, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Dark Phoenix, Hellboy, Joker, and the granddaddy of them all, Avengers: Endgame. Resultantly, Brightburn didn’t receive the love nor attention it deserved in 2019, but if you look back at it now, it’s the most original film out of this comic book movie buffet of mostly bangers and mash. It was ahead of its time, signalling a warning to the genre that it needed to change to survive – and hardly anyone listened at the time.

‘Brightburn’ isn’t a superhero movie – it’s a horror

Brightburn feels like a DC Elseworlds story. What would happen if Superman arrived on Earth, but he used his powers for evil rather than good? In this story, a couple, Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman), discover a crash-landed alien spaceship carrying a baby. They adopt the boy and name him Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn). As Brandon begins to grow up and discover his powers, he learns about where he came from and starts to hear the spacecraft calling out to him. Instead of becoming the protector of humanity, he turns into the harbinger of death.

Director David Yarovesky told Collider that the moment he read Brightburn‘s script, he envisioned the film in a specific way that was different from everything else out there in the superhero genre. “The idea was shooting a superhero movie like John Carpenter shoots Michael Myers,” he said, explaining how Halloween formed a solid basis of how he wanted to tackle the story from an aesthetical point-of-view.

However, Yarovesky pointed out how Brightburn wasn’t exactly what you would term a superhero horror. Instead, it was a horror movie influenced by the zeitgeist of superheroes at the time. The director unpacked how audiences viewed superheroes as the ultimate saviors and great hope of society, but in Brightburn, they become everything you fear. Essentially, that’s what any good horror movie should aim to do.

‘Brightburn’ walked so that others could fly

A few months after the release of Brightburn, The Boys debuted on Amazon Prime Video. While it might not be a horror-related program, it tackles a similar theme to Brightburn: What if superheroes aren’t actually good people? Fast-forward a few seasons later, The Boys stands out as one of the best superhero offerings around, because it doesn’t abide by the previous tropes and rules established by the genre.

While a lot of people credit The Boys for refreshing the concept of superhero media, Brightburn also deserves its share of the plaudits for daring to be different in a time in which everything was the same. Again, think back to the landscape of 2019 and the superhero offerings at the time. It was origin stories (Captain Marvel and Shazam!), sequels (Spider-Man: Far From Home and Dark Phoenix), and team-up movies (Avengers: Endgame). In 2019, these movies made money hand over fist, and they didn’t even need to be good to top the box office charts. Everyone hit the theaters, because it was a comic book movie. 

Brightburn was the rebel. The outsider. Despite the “bright” in its name, it was far from it. Like Halloween, there was no happily ever after, because everyone knew that Brandon would be back to terrorize further victims. He was an unstoppable force of nature, and his superpowers combined with his sadistic nature made him one of the greatest threats to humanity. In 2019, audiences rejected it, because how dare a superhero movie not have an optimistic and colorful tone? The heresy!

A warning not heeded 

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It affected every person and industry. As the world emerged from a masked-up haze, everything and everyone was changed by the event. All of a sudden, audiences weren’t rushing back to cinemas to pay for overpriced stale popcorn and deal with inconsiderate patrons who have a parasitic relationship with their phones. Plus, what was the point when you could stay in and watch bang-average movies on a streaming subscription?

The superhero genre suffered. Unless it was a mega-blockbuster, people weren’t showing up for these flicks. Yet, studios learned the wrong lesson from this. They threw more money at the problem, believing bigger CGI and more nostalgia would attract the audience. It worked for a while, but the viewers smartened up to it and have become far more discerning about what they spend their money on. Comic book movies aren’t dead – far from it – but they’re lingering in the same weird zone as the zombie genre. The diehards continue to show up; however, the oversaturation soured the wider audience. After a while, how many times can you see the same ideas recycled and repurposed on screen?

Brightburn, though, shone a light on a different path, because it understood that the superhero genre was snowballing toward the end of a cliff. The film demonstrated how filmmakers and studios could be bolder and innovative in their approach, encouraging them to deconstruct the burgeoning monster and rebuild something new, something fresh. Not many people paid attention, and now the genre is in further dire straits because of it. Who would have thought that Brightburn would be the most important superhero movie of the 2010s and nobody noticed?