INDIE CINEMA TAKES ON TEEN VIOLENCE

LOS ANGELES: Three decades after Stand by

Me cast its long shadow over coming-of-age storytelling, Stephen King’s influence continues to resonate with theater-goers and TV audiences.

Based on King’s novella

The Body, Rob Reiner’s

1986 cult hit spawned its own genre, typically featuring a group of wisecracking, cursing kids, often on bikes, facing up to teenage trauma in Anytown, United States.

Several Steven Spielberg movies fit the mold, as does J.J. Abrams’s Super Eight, but critics also point to small screen fare like the Duffer Brothers’

Stranger Things and the

1990 horror TV miniseries It, remade this year as a smash-hit theatrical film.

The latest example of the genre, indie movie Super Dark

Times, is unlikely to reach anything like as wide an audience as

It, but the critical plaudits are comparable. Part coming-of-age fable, part brutal teen slasher, Kevin Phillips’s feature directorial debut is not based on a King novel, but owes a clear debt to its “kids on bikes” predecessors.

“The themes that were present in the script both enticed me and scared me,” Phillips said at a preview screening ahead of the film’s US release yesterday.

“It took me a while to truly come around to deciding this was the movie to make.”

The events take place in a pleasant but prosaic suburb in upstate New York, where Zach (Owen Campbell) and his intense, mop-haired friend Josh (Charlie Tahan) are negotiating young adulthood in the mid1990s. It is the era before social media and smartphones but teenagers have never needed the Internet to find their kicks in first loves and experimenting with drugs.

The boys’ relationship changes suddenly and traumatically when Josh accidentally kills their overbearing companion Daryl (Max Talisman) with a samurai sword in a tussle fuelled by an argument over cannabis.

They hide the body and Zach goes back to his everyday life, trying to present a cool front but backing away from a budding relationship with high school crush Allison (Elizabeth Cappuccino).

Josh, apparently traumatised by guilt, retreats to his bedroom at first — only to return suddenly to school and his social life, acting like he doesn’t have a care in the world. But the nightmare of what has happened sets in motion an increasingly complex set of circumstances that spiral into dark paranoia and spectacular violence. Phillips worked with cinematographer Eli Born to create something that “could harken back to films we loved growing up when we were kids in the 1990s,” he said.