James Gunn opens up about how the hack-and-slash video game Lollipop Chainsaw inspired Harley Quinn's hallway fight scene in The Suicide Squad. Released in 2012, the Suda51 title centered on Juliet Starling, a cheerleader at the fictional San Romero High School in California who finds her 18th birthday ruined by a zombie apocalypse and must utilize her and her family's zombie hunting skills to save the world. Lollipop Chainsaw received generally positive reviews upon its release and became publisher Grasshopper Manufacture's best-selling title with over 1 million units shipped worldwide.
Acting as a stand-alone follow-up to David Ayer's 2016 film, The Suicide Squad sees Amanda Waller building a new Task Force X to head to the fictional South American island of Corto Maltese to destroy the Nazi-era laboratory Jotunheim and all evidence of the mysterious Project Starfish. Though still struggling to find its feet at the box office, the film has received rave reviews from critics and audiences alike and celebrating Gunn's unique approach to the material. While many have drawn comparisons to The Suicide Squad and Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy films, it appears the Marvel Cinematic Universe team isn't the only past project Gunn looked to for his DC Extended Universe debut.
With the film now in theaters and on HBO Max, Gunn took the time to discuss The Suicide Squad with Collider. In talking about the frequently promoted hallway fight scene involving Harley Quinn and an explosion of flowers, Gunn revealed he turned to his own past with Lollipop Chainsaw as a sort of visual and thematic reference for the sequence. See what Gunn said below:
"Well, I think in some ways it's something that ... I did a video game called Lollipop Chainsaw, and I always loved the sort of ... In that game, which I did was with Suda in Japan, I always loved the way that the hearts and beautiful little things came out of people mixed with blood. So, a lot of it goes back to that, the aesthetic of mixing this horrible gore with Harley's starry-eyed way of looking at life and creating Harley-vision basically. So that was something that came on very early. It was in the first draft of the script."
Given the team-up nature of the film, Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Ayer's Suicide Squad have been the key points of comparison for many audiences since he was announced to be writing and directing the film. Not only would many be happily surprised to find that The Suicide Squad would surpass both films, but also stayed true to his war film influences in its story, tone and deaths. With that in mind, it proves rather interesting that Gunn would look to Lollipop Chainsaw for reference on the film.
Though set in a zombie apocalypse, Lollipop Chainsaw took a rather tongue-in-cheek and colorful approach to its world-ending story and fighting through hordes of zombies and most critics agreed it worked. While neither DCEU film took itself too seriously, The Suicide Squad did lean into the dramatic frequently, namely with Harley and her continued growth after Birds of Prey. Despite this, though, Gunn's melding of the two proved rather effective in matching the tone of the cult favorite video game and is sure to see many revisit it and the film for side-by-side comparisons. The Suicide Squad is now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.
Source: Collider
