“Most certainly a major influence was the work of Jan Švankmajer, whose films I saw while I was working on my Doom Patrol proposal. Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker whose films are often mistakenly described as surrealist. (In truth, they’re only surrealist in the strict ‘super real’ sense of that much-maligned word.) The films are generally fairly short; they use a combination of live action and animation of everyday objects; and they present a disturbing vision of a world set free from all logical constraints. Švankmajer has just released a full-length interpretation of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and if you get the chance to see it, jump at it.
The season of Švankmajer films was augmented by ‘surrealist’ classics like Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice and Maya Deren’s eerie Meshes of the Afternoon, so when the time came to start work on Doom Patrol, I’d immersed myself in the atmosphere of these weird, irrational worlds and was all set to bring some of that dream like ambiance to the stories I was planning.”
— Grant Morrison