Ever since the Sandman segment about the little mole, I was aware that Czech children’s food from the past can be quite scary. I have never come across this red-nosed insect eater. But things can go a whole step more disturbing – for example with a grotesque film adaptation of the classic fantasy children’s book Alice in Wonderland.
The imaginative material penned by Lewis Carroll was taken up by the brilliant stop-motion artist Jan Švankmajer at the end of the 80s, who created his first long-term work with Alice. You have to decide for yourself whether this belongs in a museum or at your next Halloween party. In any case, the film has been haunting me for years and whenever I pull it out as a horror insider tip for Halloween, it’s always a big hello.
Pure horror: Alice in Wonderland with animal carcasses and the scariest girl in the world
You can easily imagine how Alice, played by Kristýna Kohoutová, is friends with the two girls from Shining and Ring-Ghost Samara. Their disturbing version of Wonderland is a series of barren, depressing rooms that inhabited by stuffed animals, animated skeletons and objects Frankensteined into creatures becomes. As in the original story, the daydreamer follows the white rabbit, who in this version loses more and more sawdust from his stuffed body as he digs out his pocket watch.
The bizarre appearance is complemented by the monotone narration voice of Alice, whose lips appear on the screen in close-up as she repeats the phrase over and over again “…said the White Rabbit” repeated. Even David Lynch couldn’t imagine a more surreal nightmare. But when you briefly awaken from the paralysis of terror, you have to appreciate the masterpiece of craftsmanship every now and then. The way Švankmajer brings the various creatures to life in harmony with the live-action Alice is unparalleled in the entire film world to this day.
What shouldn’t be missed, of course: a traumatizing tea party, growing and shrinking through the consumption of various delicacies and a showdown at the court of the beheading enthusiast Queen of Hearts. These stations are complemented by many Ideas ranging from brilliant to nastywhich not only deprive a children’s audience of sleep. Just ask my Halloween guests from a few years ago, who couldn’t stop talking because of the unexpected Wonderland horror.
Excerpt from Jan Švankmajer’s Alice:
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The whole thing ends appropriately bloodthirsty with the awakened Alice, who has just escaped being beheaded by the playing cards in Wonderland. Finding a pair of scissors she thinks, instead, cut off the late rabbit’s head yourself.
Švankmajer, who went on to make Faust with Marionettes or the Eastern European fairy tale of the all-devouring root baby Little Otik, is well aware of the eeriness of his works. In a video on his YouTube channel he explains:
All my films are standing on the border between the grotesque and horror. That’s the mood in which I feel most comfortable, when you walk on this border and sometimes fall into the grotesque, sometimes into the horror, because you can’t keep the balance. How to watch Švankmajer’s Alice?
Unfortunately, the Czech Alice in Wonderland is still a bit too obscure to appear regularly on the stream. However, a few years ago the British film institute BFI released a remastered version of the film on Blu-ray, which can be ordered from the UK.
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