MOVIE NEWS – The director also reiterated that this film wants to focus on the detective aspect of Batman

Add horror elements to the list of things you’ll find in The Batman. While it’s nothing new for Dark Knight stories to try to dabble in more terrifying and disturbing elements, it looks like the new DC and Warner Bros. film will have horror as a key part of its tone.

This week Movie Maker magazine published a lengthy article on The Batman, and in it, in addition to Robert Pattinson once again clarifying that his comments about training for the role were a joke, director Matt Reeves explained some elements of the plot. Specifically, Reeves indicated that one of his main proposals for The Batman had to make a story that dealt with corruption in Gotham.

“I wanted to do a story where the corruption of Gotham was one of the most important aspects of the story because Gotham is a sickly place,” Reeves explained. “Bruce is desperate to try to make a change. He’s still trapped, to be honest, emotionally stunted from being ten years old because it’s a trauma that you don’t get over: witnessing your parents’ murder in that place.”

Of course, the idea of Bruce Wayne as someone scarred by the murder of his parents is not something new and is rather a staple of the Batman mythos. In that sense, Reeves is no stranger to that, but he makes it clear that he wants to use that trauma and the Bat’s crime-fighting crusade to bring out the character’s famous detective side.

“This idea of a place that is corrupt, and you try to swim against the tide in order to fight against it and make a difference, is quintessential Batman. And at the centre of those noir stories is almost always the detective, right? And that’s why he is the world’s greatest detective. And so this story is, in addition to being almost a horror movie, and a thriller, and an action movie, at its core, it’s also very much a detective story. It’s very narrative. It’s a story about a place that’s corrupt,” he says.

And perhaps in one of the more curious elements of that interview, Reeves explained that this premise will allow The Batman to be “almost a horror movie, a thriller and an action movie, essentially” at the same time as “it’s also a detective story”. As you can deduce based on what has been revealed about the film so far, those elements of horror and mystery will come courtesy of Batman’s conflict with The Riddler and Reeves himself confirmed as much.

“The premise of the movie is that Riddler is shaped in a kind of almost Zodiac Killer mode, and he’s killing very prominent figures in Gotham, and they’re the pillars of society,” the director explained. “These are supposedly legitimate figures. It starts with the mayor, and then it escalates from there. And, in the wake of the murders, it reveals the ways in which these people were not all they said they were, and you begin to realise that there is some kind of association. And so, like Woodward and Bernstein, you have Gordon and Batman trying to follow the clues to try to make sense of this in a classic detective story way.”

The Batman will be released on 3 March.

Source: latercera