Brandon Breyer is the titular protagonist villain of the 2019 superhero horror film Brightburn. He is an alien who was sent to earth as a baby to eventually conquer it at puberty.
He is protrayed by Jackson A. Dunn
Biography[]
As Brandon got older, he started to develop his abilities such as realizing he had superhuman strength. After attempting to return to the ship he arrived in, Brandon's mannerisms start to darken, making his adoptive parents conclude that something was wrong with him.
Tori later finds drawings that depict disturbing imagery. As he got older, Brandon developed a crush on one of his classmates named Caitlyn and he goes to her house and stalks her. Upon discovering that their chickens had been massacred and implicating Brandon as being responsible for it, Brandon began to be ostracized by his fellow classmates for being a creepy stalker. In a trust exercise, Caitlyn initially refuses to catch Brandon on the grounds of seeing him as a disturbed pervert. This culminates in him breaking her hand and he is then suspended for two days. Once more, Brandon tries to return to his spaceship and repeats the words "take the world" in his extraterrestrial language. It's implied that Brandon was sent by an imperialistic and evil alien race (his species) that destroys planets and eradicates peaceful races.
Brandon goes to see Caitlyn again only to realize that he was denied the opportunity by her mother. Angered, Brandon murders her mother at a diner. After her attempts at counseling her nephew failed, Merilee threatens to call the police to handle the situation only to be on the receiving end of these threats by Brandon. Her husband Noah later tries to inform his parents only to be gruesomely murdered in his car by the alien boy. Realizing what he had done, Kyle takes his adoptive son into the woods and shoots him in the back of the head. Unfortunately, Brandon is revealed to be immune to bullets, and he kills his adoptive father with his laser vision. Tori finds multiple drawings of the murders Brandon had committed and calls the police. When the police arrive, they are brutally murdered by the villain.
Tori manages to get to the spaceship, and she takes part of it to act as a shiv rationalizing that it must be her son's weakness. Embracing her son, Brandon picks up on what she attempted to do with a scrap of metal, and he takes her high into the Earth's atmosphere and drops her to her death. He also causes a plane wreck as a means of covering up his crimes. There were no survivors. This concludes with Brandon going on a murderous campaign and slaughtering numerous people worldwide and leveling cities. He was last seen alongside his dead parents looking innocent.
Personalityedit | edit source
The alien baby that would become Brightburn arrived on Earth within a meteor that crash-landed near the home of a couple named Tori and Kyle Breyer in 2006. As the farm couple cannot conceive a child, they adopted the child as one of their own and named him Brandon, oblivious to the alien's dark nature. They also salvaged the remains of the meteor around that time, which turned out to be an alien ship. Triviaedit | edit source
External linksedit | edit source
The concepts of Brightburn was explored in a 2017 DC comic, a Halloween special that had many short horror stories in an "else world" style - one of these stories had Superman re-imagined as an evil invader (named "Bump in the Night") - the short story even ends with the young Superman destroying the Kent farm and heading off to presumably destroy the rest of humanity, a striking similarity to how Brightburn ends (just like Brightburn the evil Superman of this story is a child (at least in appearance)).
Because of Brightburn's jarring similarities with Superman, there are those who worried whether James Gunn will be sued for copyright violation by DC. Fortunately, James Gunn reassured that he has good relationships with DC (the company had entrusted him to direct the upcoming film The Suicide Squad and Superman's well-known background has been used in so many stories that it became a generic origin story route).
In a first class scene, David tells how some wasps place their young in a separate hive, forcing others to feed them. This is a first hint of his true nature.
The director took inspiration from slashers such as John Carpenter's Halloween for the spooky and iconic look of his evil superhero. He told about that : "There was one image I couldn't get out of my head of filming a superhero the way Michael Myers was filmed - that shot of him from afar watching someone from a distance in silence, without moving. Then this image of him floating out the window came to mind. I knew if this picture was scary, if you could see this character with a cloak and a mask hovering across the window and being terrified of it, this movie might work."
Brightburn's costume had to give the impression that it was made by himself with the means at hand, such as a blanket, shoe laces and strings. The costume designer imagined a mix between a superhero and a slasher character. She tried on up to 120 masks and capes before stopping at a model inspired by a wrestling mask with lacing up the front.
The actor who played him, Jackson A. Dunn, told about him : "At the start of the film, Brandon is completely normal. He loves his family. His inability to bond with children his age probably makes him uncomfortable, but his intelligence is such that he prefers to talk with his family and adults in general. I could experience the changes he goes through throughout the film and how different he is at the beginning and the end. It's weird, because there are some things I can tap into in my real life. But then a part of him kills people".
An alternate ending originally planned for the film was going to show Caitlyn Connor building a cybernetic arm for herself, likely with the intentions to get revenge on Brightburn for what he did to her and her mother. This likely means that if a sequel gets made, Brightburn will possibly face Caitlyn as his archenemy.