4 x 48 mins
Wonderland: Gothic 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.
Wonderland: Gothic 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 colonised, not least in the historic form of Imperial Gothic and the new emerging forms of Black Gothic.
The four-part documentary series 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.
