The fascinating Wonderland factual TV series returns to Sky Arts this Autumn with an all-new four-part series, Wonderland: Gothic, which explores the phenomenon of “Gothic” and its themes of darkness, emotion, romance, mystery, and menace, and is filled with illustrations from literature, film, art, architecture, and performance.
The series premieres at 9pm on Tuesday 7th November and examines this highly visualised and persistent voice of a counterculture which has resisted and questioned rationality and authority. Represented by works as diverse as Dracula, Wuthering Heights, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Night of the Living Dead, Get Out and the extraordinary paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, Gothic has achieved mass popularity from its inception and feels as modern now as it did at its creation 250 years ago.
The legacies of slavery and colonialism haunt the Gothic and the worlds it portrays – the colonizer and the colonized, not least in the historic form of Imperial Gothic and the new emerging forms of Black Gothic.
The new four-part documentary series, Wonderland: Gothic, combines biography, literary extracts, and interviews with leading academics and film director Tim Burton, together with excerpts from the many books and films made of Gothic work to explore what was behind these well-known Gothic stories.
The first episode starts with a look at the general characteristics of Gothic and the privileged racial position of the white race. It explores eighteenth-century Gothic which had its roots in a backlash against conformity from wealthy gay or bisexual young men including Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, with their renewed interest in both the medieval and in new forms of Gothic architecture.
Edition two starts with examining Bram Stoker’s Dracula and delves into vampires, werewolves, and zombies. It looks at their shape shifting nature, reflecting changing public concerns, fears, and anxieties about societal boundaries. While the third instalment starts with covering the work of Angela Carter and Hilary Mantel. Toni Morrison’s Nobel prizewinning Beloved is evoked, together with its devastating description of slavery and its hauntings.
In the final episode, Imperial Gothic literature is covered at the start of episode four with an examination of the work of Rudyard, Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad. There is also much more contained in each edition ranging from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and T S Eliot’s notion of the “unlived life” in his revolutionary modernist poem The Waste Land to the notion of the “return of the repressed” and the human predilection for evil and violence is illustrated with the continuation of forms of war, and the hope that the Gothic form allows the representation of formerly repressed and ignored aspects of human nature.
