Use of Tropes: Alice in Terrorland

One book I have always adored is Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, as I moved from childhood, I realised what a good vehicle it was to create a darker, adult hue. This is the case here, although I must say that I think the title of Richard John Taylor’s 2023 vehicle is awful and made me, at least, think that I was going to get a “The Asylum” level of film, rather than what we did get.

So Alice (Lizzy Willis) is a young lady who survives the fire that kills her parents. She spends a short time in the care system until her grandmother, Beth (Rula Lenska, SON of Nosferatu), is located and she is sent to Wonderland to stay with her. Wonderland is an old, decaying house, remote in the countryside, where Lewis Carroll had been said to have lived for a time and the family had changed the house name to Wonderland in honour of that. Alice, Beth tells her, was named for the book, although Alice and Beth had never met – her mother and grandmother were estranged.

Steve Wraith as the Rabbit

Alice develops a fever and Beth sits with her, reading from the book. She has a series of fever dreams based on Wonderland and the characters within, but the nightmarish dreams may be trying to warn her of something in the real world. They are filled with dark imagery as the characters from Wonderland come to life in her mind, for instance the Rabbit (Steve Wraith) is a mask wearing child killer, whose homicide is triggered by tardiness and the Walrus (Rikki Kimpton) is a carpenter who is also a cannibalistic serial killer.

the Red Queen

The vampire trope comes in around the Red Queen, who is represented in the dreams as Beth. The Red Queen, on a couple of occasions, reveals a maw of sharp teeth and we see her with her skin looking dead at one point. The appearance of the teeth, of course, reminds the viewer of certain constructions of the vampire image. Tied to this is the warning Alice receives that the Red Queen is grief and she feeds on it. They, then, are our tropes.

Beth and Alice

The film itself is an interesting psychological exploration of grief and instinct, Alice’s subconscious grasping the unheimlich and warning her of the danger it senses within the uncanny. The low budget is combatted by clever photography of the Gothic surrounds and the use of shadow and insinuation to hide within. The shame is that a bigger budget may have allowed the filmmakers to draw the Wonderland characters in a more complex way and draw some of the terror forth. The film rests on the performances of Lizzy Willis and Rula Lenska, both of whom do a sterling job.

The imdb page is here.