Who Are The Eyes Of The Adversary In Suicide Squad

While the big bad of Suicide Squad is an as-yet-unidentified “Adversary,” that character won’t be the only one who takes on the team during the course of the film.

Who’s working for him? Well, he’s got eyes everywhere.

No, seriously. His army of agents are known as the Eyes of the Adversary…and they’re really creepy.

“Pretty disturbing. They’re really disturbing,” director Ayer said during a recent set visit. “It’s hard to come up with bad guys and it’s hard to come up with creatures. I think it’s one of the most difficult things. If you look at modern development in film it’s brutal. You want to do something fresh, yet, you also want to do something very specific to this world and unique. You know, I think we kind of nailed it. It’s sort of related to the bad guy stuff and the bad guy stuff is very much a sealed locked box.”

But…what really are they? When a reporter asked whether the Eyes of the Adversary were original creations by Ayer, he gave a kind of yes-and-no answer:

“Only in the sense that, if you look at Joker has his henchmen,” Ayer said. “There’s always sort of the henchmen concept in comic books. The specific visuals of what they are and how they work, sure, but it’s very much out of canon that you have these armies of servants.”

“I was looking at people covered in oil, basically, as a starting point,” said costume designer Kate Hawley. “I’d been looking at a lot of voodoo and occult stuff. We started embedding things into it and eyes were a big theme and these creatures and things. It’s almost like a voodoo doll really, they are. Or little inky oiled up soldiers really because we had all these soldiers so they became these little inky things.”

A combat patch on the shoulder of one of those soldiers says “Escort to Darkness,” and has an image of a giant tentacle reaching up out of the ground, hinting at the Adversary’s true nature.

It feels good to be bad…Assemble a team of the world’s most dangerous, incarcerated Super Villains, provide them with the most powerful arsenal at the government’s disposal, and send them off on a mission to defeat an enigmatic, insuperable entity. U.S. intelligence officer Amanda Waller has determined only a secretly convened group of disparate, despicable individuals with next to nothing to lose will do. However, once they realize they weren’t picked to succeed but chosen for their patent culpability when they inevitably fail, will the Suicide Squad resolve to die trying, or decide it’s every man for himself?

Suicide Squad hits theaters August 5, 2016.