TUCKER: It was a place that represented the horror...
...that Batman was dealing with on a nightly level.
COUSINEAU: Whoever is incarcerated in an asylum becomes even more mad.
And is even lusting more and more and more for vengeance.
WEIN: The crazier and more macabre that Arkham became...
...the more it reflected what Gotham City was becoming.
HARRIS: Originally, Batman, when he became Batman...
...the first thing he said before he actually came up with the idea, he said:
"I wanna be something dark and mysterious.
Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot."
So he wanted to be mysterious.
And for the first year of his existence he was.
He was very mysterious.
So when they added Robin...
...that mysterious element seemed to be, um, diminished.
Batman, through the '50s, if you've ever read the Batmans in the '50s...
...it got kind of simplistic and what they called "camp" later.
WEIN: Batman had long since stopped being a dark knight.
This is the Batman that goes to charity auctions, kids' birthday parties.
CARLIN: It was sock hops and rock 'n' roll until everything switched.
And there was the Vietnam War...
...and flower power and all that...
...and it really did change in the world that quickly, within--
It was a decade, and there was an effort made by DC...
...to kind of get back to Batman's roots.
WEIN: Denny O'Neil said, "He's the Dark Knight. He's grim, he's mysterious.
That's the character as he should be portrayed."
So they started doing those stories.
"The Joker's Five-Way Revenge," I think, was one of the first ones.
Then they brought back Two-Face...
...who hadn't been seen in the book in, God, at that point, 10 or 15 years at least.
Because everyone thought he was too dark and grim, and they went:
"No, no. This is exactly what you want for Batman."
DIDIO: If you watch the rogues gallery for Batman...
...you see a real wide array...
...of very strange and bizarre characters that inhabit his world.
So when Denny O'Neil was writing Batman back in the '70s...
...he created Arkham Hospital...
...um, as the location for these characters to inhabit...
...or places for them to retire some of these characters to.
Arkham, the name comes from H.P. Lovecraft.
H.P. Lovecraft was definitely a genre writer who comic book writers were aware of.
There's a lot of influence of H.P. Lovecraft and that side of psychological horror.
And sometimes, the scarier things in the world are all in your head.
And, uh, so he was definitely mining that kind of stuff.
DIDIO: Therefore, it brings on a lot of ideas of it being much more than just a hospital...
...but a place where madness lives and thrives.
And ultimately, as people saw this idea, they decided to expand on it...
...and Arkham Hospital ultimately became Arkham Asylum.
CARLIN: It's a gold mine for psychological situations.
And Batman is nothing if not a psychological character.
Uh, why would a guy do any of the things he does?
DIDIO: It became the place where all of Batman's criminals went...
...because the criminals themselves in Batman's world weren't the normal ones...
...that are locked up in a regular establishment and jail.
Because they were more insane...
...this seemed to be the natural place to retire them all to.
[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]
Our word "asylum" is an old Latin word for sanctuary.
However, in about the 17th century...
...the asylums became transmogrified.
It was turned into a monstrous idea...
...because Western Europe started putting...
...its mad, insane, crazy, dangerous people away.
That is one of the reasons...
...why the whole gothic horror imagination was created...
...because the thing that you put away is the thing that you're repressing.
And if you're putting away all of that aberrant behavior...
...you can no longer understand it.
You can no longer take-- Get a grip on it.
It becomes more and more and more monstrous...
...the more secret it is.
CARLIN: I don't know what inspired the guys at the time...
...but I do know that most people...
...when they're writing comics or making animated films...
...they do try to reflect something...
...about what's going on in the world around them at the time.
COUSINEAU: Two curious things happened in the 1960s.
The first was a humanist psychologist named Thomas Szasz...
...wrote a book about the myth, in the pejorative sense...
...the myth of madness.
And in that, he opened up the lid to this pressure cooker...
...that we're describing that is the asylum, and said:
"There has been aberrant behavior on the part of the psychologist...
...on the part of people who work for the state.
These are torture chambers." This was everybody's worst fear.
And Arkham, I think, evolved out of that.
DIDIO: As we entered the '60s into the early '70s, there was a level of social relevance.
And probably on DC side...
...Denny O'Neil was at the forefront of that social relevance...
...and adding that to the storytelling.
He's stepped onboard with books like Green Arrow...
...and wound up telling deeper, more rich stories...
...than the space dramas that were in that series before.
And now, also, when he enters into Batman's world...
...he's starting to analyze the psychological aspects of who Batman is...
...the trauma that built him...
...and then also how the villains that inhabit Batman's world also are built...
...out of trauma and horror and madness.
The theory, obviously, perpetuated in Len Wein's Who's Who entry...
...about Arkham.
Back in the late '70s, early '80s...
...I was editing a book for DC called Who's Who in the DC Universe.
And it was, essentially, an encyclopedia.
Here's a page on every major and a lot of the minor characters.
We've got....
I was editing the book, I was writing the book.
I wouldn't have to get anybody else's permission to do anything.
So I cheated all over the place on the book.
The first time Arcane, Swamp Thing's archenemy...
...is given the first name is in the Who's Who.
I introduced it there. And when we got to Arkham, I said:
"Well, here's this great, really interesting place, but where did it come from?"
So I sat down in the office one afternoon...
...off the top of my head, completely stream of consciousness...
...I created the origin of Arkham Asylum.
The history of the Arkham family is pretty twisted and dark and grotesque...
...so bringing a lot of those elements...
...into what is this very, you know, macabre place.
WEIN: Some guy who had murdered Arkham's wife, and Arkham decided:
"l will be a wonderful human being, I will rehabilitate him."
And he rehabilitated him until the day he was accidentally electrocuted.
It's very clear if you read it...
...Arkham built the place to get the guy who had murdered his wife.
Ultimately, in the origin...
...I think Arkham himself ends up an inmate in the place...
...spent the rest of his life scratching the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"...
...onto the floors and the walls of his cell with his fingers.
DIDIO: When Len came onboard, he created a much richer, deeper continuity...
...and saw all the intricate bits and pieces of Batman's world...
...and the addition of Arkham Asylum as a recurring character.
Because just the way Gotham City is a character in Batman's world...
...Arkham Asylum is a very important character in Batman's world.
TUCKER: So the idea of having them go to a special place...
...that was as malevolent and as evil as they were...
...um, kind of framed Batman's world, in a way.
He wasn't just bringing regular crooks and putting them in regular jails.
He was taking them to this, um, bedlam, this place of insanity and horror.
And the more they added, the more mysterious and demented it became.
You know, this place becomes almost like a haunted house.
CARLIN: There is something about the house that could even drive you crazy.
There's something about this mansion...
...that if you come in normal, you're not gonna leave normal.
-Boo. -Aah!
OLIVA: And this whole idea of them sending--
You know, when they send Joker there to be held and to--
Rehabilitated. It never really works out.
And boom.
GUARD: Aah!
DIDIO: You know, you look at Jeremiah Arkham who--
The creator of it, and he goes mad.
You look at Harley Quinn who starts originally as this psychiatrist in Arkham...
...and then she goes mad.
Dr. Crane who becomes the Scarecrow, he goes mad.
And even Hugo Strange...
...who is another character who was originally an analyst...
...who also comes to the darker side.
It's like the madness of the place almost permeated them...
...and turned them into the people that they were locking up and analyzing.
Arkham doesn't help anybody, you know.
It's like-- You know, you put a bunch of mad men together, you're--
They're just gonna get madder.
You know, heh, they're not gonna get helped.
DIDIO: When Grant Morrison did his Arkham Asylum graphic novel--
This is important. It was a graphic novel.
It was a single, encased, done-in-one story.
Beginning, middle and end.
And what Grant was able to do in that story...
...was really examine all the psychological impact Arkham had...
...on its inhabitants and Batman himself.
So when you say it has a dream-like feeling, it's because it's only--
It's almost like a madness borne in a fever.
CARLIN: When Grant Morrison wrote the Arkham Asylum graphic novel...
...he took it into a place of symbolism...
...and really complex imagery...
...that reflected not just the architecture of Arkham...
...but the psychological makeup of Arkham.
DIDIO: One thing you need to know about Grant Morrison is he has equal love in science...
...in magic and comics.
And when you look at the Arkham Asylum graphic novel that he did...
...it really combined all aspects of all of his greatest interests...
...in one of his favorite characters, Batman.
OLIVA: Arkham Asylum didn't really become a character...
...until, you know, that Arkham Asylum graphic novel, when that came out.
For me, myself, it was very influential...
...to kind of my storytelling, and even my perception of Arkham.
Dave McKean's art on that is exceptional.
The graphic novel used a lot of, um, paintings...
...that reflected the artwork of the Expressionist period.
So you get artwork that's very psychological in nature.
It's very horrific and mentally-challenging imagery.
Images of screaming and crying and torture.
CARLIN: Grant's thumbnails for the story...
...they are much more traditional and straightforward than the final book is.
And Dave McKean definitely gives that book its dreamscape feel...
...or nightmare-scape.
DIDIO: He's an extraordinarily stylized artist that captured all the emotion...
...and all the feel and the thoughts and the energy...
...that Grant brought to his storytelling.
And for the people who read it, it's an immersive story.
It's something where it affects you on an emotional level...
...and I think that's exactly what he was hoping to achieve with that storytelling.
Heh, I mean, it looked like something you never saw before.
And it's almost vague and nebulous enough that it's like a nightmare.
KIRSHEN: There's no question, you know, Grant's Arkham Asylum book...
...is just one of the seminal works of Batman in the modern era...
...and definitely showed how amazing a character the asylum itself is.
I think Batman himself and Arkham, the asylum, the building, the--
What it stands for, is they're both a juxtaposition of ideas of light and dark.
COUSlNEAU: Aldous Huxley, of all people, wrote a brilliant paper about Piranesi...
...this brilliant Italian artist, engraver...
...who created a whole series...
...of extremely haunting, dark, black-and-white, shadow-infested images...
...of prisons in Rome.
These are haunting to this day, it rips you right to your core...
...because of its purposelessness.
There are doorways that don't open, stairways that don't go anywhere.
There are torture devices throughout all of these engravings.
And Huxley points out that it's a kind of image...
...that says asylums have no purpose other than terror.
Piranesi's imagery of the dark, foreboding, shadow-strewn torture chambers...
...essentially, became the iconography later on for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein...
...for Bram Stoker's Dracula...
...for Coleridge and his iconography of the "Ancient Mariner."
These are all stories of the deep terrors that are repressed in us.
And the Arkham mythology is exactly that.
It's the fight between light and dark.
CARLIN: The fact that there are hallways and corridors...
...and dark corners, uh, in Arkham is really--
It's the same as what's going on in your brain.
There's secret places.
There's places that you don't like bumping into about your own, you know, psychosis.
It's a physical reflection of that mental prison.
When you're telling that story, it's to create that sense of unease...
...uncertainty and be unsettling.
Well, it's like being lost in a funhouse, you know, in a maze.
COUSINEAU: The word "labyrinth" and "maze" are usually used interchangeably.
But they are different.
A maze has several ways in and several ways out.
The labyrinth has one path only to the center.
It's usually the thing that's repressed that's in the very center of the labyrinth.
I think any time you build a labyrinth or a maze into storytelling, it's--
You're bringing the reader on the journey with the person that's trapped in that maze.
I mean, every turn, when you're inside Arkham, brings you deeper into madness.
Every turn, you think you're gonna be coming out to the light...
...or trying to find escape...
...you're actually getting caught deeper into the maze that Arkham is.
And what it is, it shows you how the building draws you in...
...and ultimately traps you.
One of the things that I think what really is attractive to a writer with Arkham...
...is, in a way, they get a chance to explore their own psyche, their own fears.
They get to play out what scares them.
And whether it's a sound that startles you awake...
...or whether it's a smell that puts you on edge, or makes you uncomfortable or nauseous...
...they find ways to integrate that type of storytelling...
...into the Arkham stories.
WEIN: The problem, of course, is comic books are two dimensional.
Everything the reader takes from the job is what's manifested by the artist...
...in how the place looks...
...and how well the writer can describe to you what kind of a place it is.
No matter how bright it is outside...
...somehow when the sun comes through the windows, it becomes gray.
All of that sort of thing is our job...
...to try to give you a sensation...
...of what it would be like to walk through those corridors.
As a filmmaker, I can kind of do things where I'll cut the music or I'll amplify the sound...
...or I'll take out all sound effects and just have the music playing.
You know, in some kind of really kind of off-kilter kind of beats...
...so that the audience isn't quite, uh, prepared to what they're gonna see...
...and they're on the edge of their seats.
TUCKER: Are they the sounds within the heads of the inmates?
Um, is it what they're hearing? Is it real?
What's real and what's unreal becomes mixed in Arkham.
You can really play with the psychology of Arkham and the people inside of it...
...by manipulating sound.
KIRSHEN: The guys at Rocksteady, the audio team at Rocksteady are amazing.
You know, they-- Both in terms of sound effects and sound design...
...and adding that mood and ambiance...
...to every kind of location and experience for Batman...
...and the kind of storytelling, the visual fidelity...
...all of those pieces have gotten, you know, to a super high quality level...
...that it almost matches some theatrical experiences that you get.
And now that we've just launched the new generation of platforms...
...and those experiences of what you can do with those things, um...
...have just been taken to a whole new level.
[EXPLOSION]
And working with those guys on the high concept and the outline...
...and sharing it with Sefton and the team at Rocksteady really, like I said...
...trying to find a way to have some loose tissue connections...
...to certain events that happened in the games...
...and also, you know, making sure that everything kind of fit...
...within the continuity of all these Arkham tales that we've been telling...
...from the Rocksteady games starting with "Arkham Asylum"...
...and then kind of playing off with the end of "Origins"...
...with this idea that Amanda Waller is starting the Suicide Squad.
Um, and making sure all the continuity is somewhat consistent.
OLIVA: So for this movie, because, you know, when I read the script, I realized:
"This is different than what I thought the script would be"...
...but the Arkham universe actually lends itself to that.
It's not set into the old universe.
It has its own kind of continuity.
And because of that, you know, it's almost anything goes.
[THUNDER CRASHES]
This movie is done in a 2-D fashion.
It's really the first time, you know, our beautiful 3-D characters from the game...
...are being interpreted in a 2-D manner.
And there's no better team to do that than WB Animation.
OLIVA: Fight choreography is one thing I'm very known for.
And I took a lot of the moves from the video game...
...and tried to incorporate into the fight choreography that we do in the movie.
Arkham Asylum is a lot of things to a lot of different people.
For me, the video game was just fun.
COUSINEAU: Our iconography of the asylum...
...is that they are riddled with people...
...who are slowly decaying, dissipating and dying.
These are the living walking dead.
DIDIO: Arkham is about the mystery of the people inside there.
Why they're locked away, what's locked away inside them?
Then we reach into the building itself. The building itself has secrets.
Secret corridor, secret places.
CARLIN: I don't think a real asylum should have secrets.
But I think a comic book asylum should definitely have secrets.
And if you're going to be a part of Batman's universe, it's all about secrets.
HARRIS: Well, everything's a secret. I mean, Batman's identity is a secret.
We all know it, but the citizens of Gotham don't know it, the villains don't know it.
And so Batman is based on secrecy.
OLIVA: The horror motif in any kind of Batman story kind of goes hand in hand...
...because Batman himself is quite a dark character.
You have a guy running around in a black costume, black cape.
The location itself and the characters inside...
...really lend to the whole kind of good-and-evil metaphor, and light and dark.
DIDIO: It shows a place where all the characters are housed, all the villains are housed.
And more importantly, there's that consistent threat...
...that they're always gonna be able to break out...
...and come back and challenge Batman and challenge Gotham.
TUCKER: When the criminal's in jail, suddenly they're the victim...
...they're the person who's being locked up.
And usually those kinds of stories...
...make the prison guards look more malevolent and villainous...
...than the, uh, actual convicts inside.
OLIVA: You get all these different kinds of characters and personalities...
...who don't work together, who've never probably even met.
The culmination of all the different personalities...
...it's just the building of this pressure cooker that will eventually explode.
The story changes you, in a way.
It makes you want to take sides with the criminal.
And you root for them to get out.
KIRSHEN: That story of trying to escape, whether it be the asylum or the city...
...to gain what, you know, they feel is their freedom...
...has been, you know, a big part of the Batman IP...
...and to the extent of our game as well.
DIDIO: Batman is putting villains in Arkham...
...because he believes that ultimately there's redemption and cure for them.
Or at least a place where they could be locked away for good.
In some ways, by putting as many criminals, or as many insane characters...
...together in one location, they actually feed on each other...
...they actually rev each other up and become a greater threat.
He has a sense of optimism and hope.
He can help rid Gotham City of crime.
He won't stop trying until he does that.
And part of that is trying to cure the people who inhabit or have affected Gotham.
Batman doesn't kill. Batman hopes to cure or heal, or at least lock them away for good.
COUSINEAU: Asylums have always had this sense...
...that they continue, even in ruins, around the world.
There are books and documentaries made about abandoned asylums...
...in which walking down the hallways, walking into the cells, into the rooms...
...you feel like you can still hear the voices of the inmates.
Arkham Asylum feels like a living, breathing character...
...because we're crazy.
Us readers and viewers are imagining that.
We're imagining that the house has powers.
Or does it?
[CHUCKLING]
DIDIO: I like to think of Arkham Asylum as always a work in progress, you know.
I've always associated Arkham closer to the Winchester house...
...with the idea that it was always being built on...
...and always being altered and always being changed.
Um, and with so many writers touching it and so many artists working on it...
...Arkham has taken on a little bit of more epic nature...
...of the size and scope of what it encompasses.
The number of inmates they are holding...
...but also the number of secret rooms it's protecting.
KIRSHEN: Part of the power of Warner Bros. and having a game division within...
...you know, a studio that also has award-winning animation...
...and TV and theatrical...
...is that we can all kind of make each of our things bigger.
CARLIN: It was a real concerted effort by DC...
...to kind of make the Batman universe a little more down and dirty.
They really brought a sense of dread to the universe...
...that a Batman could live in.