It is nothing but a vain aspiration to try to list all the Easter eggs and references in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. This martial arts yakuza revenge thriller is a patchwork of old-fashioned wuxia, samurai cinema, spaghetti westerns, Hollywood classics, the best blaxploitation, and grindhouse movies. Tarantino said in 1994, “I steal from every single movie ever made.” He’d finish that thought by stating, “Great artists steal, they don’t do homages.” He even faced a plagiarism lawsuit for Kill Bill, according to The Guardian.
Having worked in a video rental store, Quentin Tarantino had a unique opportunity to indulge in his movie obsession. He watched everything and remembered everything, later creating a postmodern self-conscious œuvre which would reflect his cocky but undeniably immense knowledge of modern cinema, from renowned masterpieces to so-called ‘trash’ movies. Tarantino had difficulty departing from Kill Bill, probably his most personal film, and countless times expressed his desire to film a third volume of the story.
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After all, it gave us one of Tarantino’s best characters, the Bride. Also known as Black Mamba (or Beatrix Kiddo), the Bride is a woman seeking revenge against a group of assassins who tried to kill her and her unborn child. The premise is straightforward and the situations she ends up in are often questionable and borderline crude: a sleazy doctor sex-trafficking comatose patients, a white woman with a samurai sword cutting up yakuza left and right, strict but wise kung-fu masters and fountains of blood. Nonetheless, it is a brilliant performance by Uma Thurman, which makes the Bride heart-wrenchingly sympathetic.
Due to meticulous genre-bending, from stylized action movies to chamber drama and absurdist comedy, Kill Bill remains a cult classic. So let us focus on the most important movies that Tarantino took from to forge his hit.
Characters Appropriated by Tarantino
Miramax Films
It would be an oversimplification to say that Tarantino simply borrows characters, plot elements, or shots from other sources. Kill Bill creates its own sort of multiverse, where stories of characters from films and TV find their continuation or an alternative version.
Before her rampage in the House of Blue Leaves, Beatrix heads to Okinawa to get a sword from the legendary Hattori Hanzo. Sonny Chiba, who played the chatty and noble Hanzo, embodies a whole era of Japanese genre cinema. He had already portrayed the legendary swordmaster in Tarantino’s favorite series Shadow Warriors. The director imagined Hanzo in Kill Bill to be a distant descendant of Hanzo from Shadow Warriors, so it made sense that they were played by the same actor.
Tarantino also poaches up Chinese master Pai Mei from Hong Kong kung fu movies. Pai Mei is usually depicted as a villain for betraying Shaolin monks. In Kill Bill, he appears as a stern master of Beatrix and Elle Driver.
Gogo Yubari (played by Chiaki Kuriyama) is a schoolgirl who acts as Ishii O-ren’s sadistic bodyguard. Yubari, a psychotic, bloodthirsty man-hating girl, is a spiritual reflection of Kuriyama’s character in the famous thriller Battle Royale. Ishii’s goons in masks allude to high school students who form a gang in Fudoh: The New Generation.
The Bride herself echoes the main character of Francois Truffaut’s French film The Bride Wore Black. Two brides on their quest for revenge cross out their victims’ names in their notebooks, once they have killed them. Machiavelli, alias of Tarantino’s Bride, is a name borrowed from Navajo Joe.
The Deadly Viper Assassination squad, which the Bride belonged to and whom she proceeds to hunt, draws its inspiration from the main characters of the Shaw Brothers’ The Five Deadly Venoms, right down to their snake codenames.
One of the Deadly Vipers has earned a particularly large space in pop culture. A mega-recognizable split-screen scene, where Elle Driver walks as a whistling nurse with an eyepatch, represents a collective citation of several of Brian de Palma’s films, most notably, Dressed to Kill, along with the exploitation movie Switchblade Sisters. Tarantino leaves several hints about her past, drawing a connection with Thriller: A Cruel Picture.
The Art of Homage
The stage setting in the House of Blue Leaves makes references to Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades and Black Lizard. And, it would be criminal to forget the iconic yellow suit on Uma Thurman that is an appreciative nod to Bruce Lee in Game of Death.
Blood spurting from wounds is an old-school filming device. The gory, grandiose, and stylish action sequences of Kill Bill are choreographed based on a rich canon of martial arts movies, like The 36th Chamber of the Shaolin and the wuxia classic One-Armed Swordsman. Stylistically, Kill Bill’s design and aesthetics relate to two movies by Japanese director Seijun Suzuki. The first volume adopts a jazzy, cartoonish feel of Tokyo Drifter, including go-go music and epic fights in clubs. Kill Bill Vol.2, on the other hand, draws its inspiration from the surrealist self-styled universe of Branded to Kill, using the stark, high-contrast black and white so well in the flashbacks of the Bride’s wedding day.
Gogo’s unusual weapon in the form of a ball on a chain and with retractable razor-sharp blades is lifted from the classic Hong Kong wuxia movie Master of the Flying Guillotine, which Tarantino has cited as one of his favorites. Blood, dripping from her eyes, is inspired by Fulci movies. Tarantino has referred to Italian horror movies more than once, City of the Living Dead, Seven Notes in Black, Deep Red…
Ishii O-Ren’s death at the end of the first volume of Kill Bill is a beautiful citation of the finale of the Japanese film Lady Snowblood. Yuki Kashima’s story of being born doomed to a life of violence and horror parallels O-Ren’s life of revenge for the murder of her parents and rise to power. Both die in a serene winter garden, in the snow, splattered with blood, to the quiet sounds of the poignant, romantic song Flower of Carnage.
Tarantino’s tapestry of Asian references is not limited solely to Chinese and Japanese cinema. The idea of an anime fragment that would show O-Ren’s flashback comes from the Indian psychological thriller Aalavandhan. Her monologue to the yakuza who killed her parents and whose stomach she cut up comes from Indian Tamil-language action thriller film Saithan.
A shot of the bullet shooting out of a gangster’s head is taken from Ichi the Killer. Death Rides a Horse inspired the scene where O-Ren watches her house burning down (and some elements in the gangsters’ design). Here we can see how bits of Indian cinema are woven into a yakuza revenge thriller with references to spaghetti westerns. This episode is a perfect illustration of Tarantino’s postmodern movie-making: he finds gems in the smallest of moments, crafting a new, cohesive story from movies of different genres, times, and cultures. Whether this is mere plagiarism or clever postmodernism is up to the viewer to decide.
