The 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.

Produced by Odyssey Television, Wonderland: Gothic premieres on Sky Arts at 9pm on November 7th 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 colonised, 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.

Wonderland: Gothic is written, produced, directed, and features an original orchestral score by Odyssey Television’s Adrian Munsey.

Episode One

• This first episode starts with 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.
• It continues by looking at the influence and continuing traditions of the ‘Female Gothic’ notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
• Mary Shelley’s remarkable prescience and insight in creating Frankenstein is illustrated together with details of her biography and her interest in the conflicts between nature and nurture.
• Illustration follows from the work of the three Bronte sisters, the extraordinary character of Heathcliff, the radicalism of Anne Bronte and the life of Rebecca du Maurier and the powerful depiction of Rebecca on film by Alfred Hitchcock.
• The episode concludes with the interest of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in spiritualism and the Gothic world of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Episode Two

• This revealing episode 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.
• Works illustrated include Edward Thomas’s The Monk, Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and other key texts.
• The episode examines Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 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.
• Zombies, ghosts, and mummies reflect anxiety about the boundaries between the living and the dead.  M R James’s ghost stories are illustrated, together with extracts from Sigmund Freud and William Shakespeare.
• The episode continues with the influence of Augustus Pugin and John Ruskin on Gothic Revival architecture. It concludes with an examination of the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the Gothic’s dynamic portrayal of the exclusion of so many from the contemporary world.

Episode Three

• The episode 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.
• The episode continues by exploring Gothic’s expression of the sense of ‘the other’, particularly in ‘Black Gothic’. Examples range from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man to Jordan Peele’s hit film Get Out.
• The concept of the ‘Gothic outsider’ is introduced with examination of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the extensive work of Stephen King. Anne Rice’s work is further explored with her exhortation “Be kind … always if you have a choice be kind.”
• The latter part of the episode is based on a discussion of Gothic film. It starts with coverage of early Gothic film including Dracula and Frankenstein, and then goes on to examine the work of James Whale, Hammer Films, George Romero, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, Jordan Peele, and individual films like The Hunger, Only Lovers Left Alive and others.

Episode Four

• 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.
• The episode continues with an exploration of Gothic art and includes the work of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Joseph Wright of Derby. JMW Turner, John Martin, Paul Nash, and others.
• The Gothic Revival in architecture is further examined in this episode in its domestic and colonial forms, taking in buildings as diverse as Strawberry Hill, Fonthill Abbey, St Pancras Station and a Gothic Revival cathedral in Vietnam.
• Cinema’s relationship with painting is assessed with examples. Queer Gothic is a further theme with many examples included.
• 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.

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Tags: Culture, dracula, Shakespeare, sky, Sky Arts