Among Mad People

You’re not exactly sure how you got here. It seems so long ago that you arrived and it felt like falling. So much about the space you’re in now feels just like the life you’re used to, but some parts are just…..unstable.

Like you. You don’t know where you fit in here. Who do you trust? What is expected of you here? Should you be planning an escape, or is this all there is. You can’t predict what will become of you. In fact, you can no longer trust yourself. Your own presence, your own consciousness is unreliable. It lies.

Even your body is a traitor.

Everywhere you look slivers of menace are looming, disguised as innocuous madness. Nonsense. There’s an impending threat that you can’t quite name, but it lingers behind every step. You know that it’s waiting for you at the end of this path, but, there’s only one path. It reeks of mania and violence, rage and terror and while it’s not exactly coming for you, you have no choice but to head straight towards it. You know it’s the only way forward, even as a bellow ripples through the sky: “Off with your head!”

In 1865, Charles Lutwidge Dawson a.k.a Lewis Carroll introduced the world to a tale of nonsense that he had written on a whim; an act to amuse and placate a group of children on a summer’s day. The world soon swallowed up Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and it’s companion tale Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass. Much like the older sibling/ babysitter/ latchkey friend who introduced each of us to The Exorcist/ It/ Child’s Play much too young, Carroll had no idea what he was unleashing.

Alice always spoke to me. I adored the whimsy and nonsense, yes, but the hook deep at my core was the fear. Here was the tale of a child unwittingly whisked away into an other-world where madness reigns, riddles go unanswered and decapitation is the ultimate threat. Add to this baffling realm that there are no safe adults; there are few helpful or caring characters, and each of them is too swept up in impossibility to be reliable. This combination creates a terrifying tale of abandonment.

There was something so delicious about the fear and dread that followed Alice through wonderland. I was hooked and have been seeking that looking glass shudder ever since.

Alice in Wonderland is saturated in themes that crop up in horror to this day. One of these that is essential to the undertone of dread in Alice is the presence of a barrier between two world. In horror films, characters are often met with a crossroads, a doorway, an unnerving entrance. For Alice, this is simply a curious moment and a rabbit hole (later, a footstep into the realm of the looking glass). It’s merely a childish instinct or sudden impulse that separates our heroine from a wilderness of fear and madness.

This concept is visible in horror often in a physical way, such as the entrance arch to the Harga community in Midsommar (2019, Ari Aster), the ominous gates of Jurassic Park (1993, Steven Spielberg), or the entrance to the forest in The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez). Once you step beyond the threshold, nothing is the same and only a few steps separate stability from madness. In BWP the rabbit hole is represented not only by the forest, the realm of a folk-horror ‘Red Queen’, but by the research of the crew as they prepare for their journey; they’ve been spirited away before they’ve even begun.

In Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), we can delight in an abundance of Alice nods. Certainly, the presence of mirrors represents the thin veil between main character Adelaide and her dual existence; above and below. Adelaide is drawn towards her doppelganger within the fun house by her own white rabbit, the pull of an intangible tether that holds tight to her curiosity and draws her near. In this film, Peele gives us an Alice who has seen the other side of the glass and who finds wonderland breaking through the reflection to come for her. To dig a little deeper into Alice imagery, we might entertain the idea of the character of Kitty (Elizabeth Moss) and her alter, Dahlia as a representation of The Cheshire cat, complete with unearthly smile. We might also take a glance at Kitty’s twin girls, Becca and Lindsay (Cali and Noelle Sheldon) as menacing, tumbling Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

Another insidious theme that lies at the root of what makes Alice in Wonderland a horror tale is the betrayal of the body/self. This concept is represented by the unpredictable bodily changes that our heroine endures. She is unable to trust her physical form. She grows and shrinks in extremes and is, thus, completely at the mercy of her environment. Not only does Alice’s body betray her, but her role in this new world is compromised as well. She has left the topside world, where girls are meant to recite lessons, read quietly and where her demure sister is the ideal role model. Once underground, Alice doesn’t have faith in herself. Her recitations fail her; language is a constantly shifting idea and she begins to question her very identity. “I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?” Alice offers the inimitable Caterpillar. Adding insult to injury, of course, our pretentious metamorphic philosopher does not, in fact, see.

These unsettling circumstances are reflected in a wealth of horror films. Body horror films are built upon the fear of the body and it’s instability (The Fly, 1986; Teeth, 2007; Black Swan, 2010), but a good number of films rely upon the ominous tensions that arise when we cannot trust how we fit into the world.

For instance, Stephen King uses fairy-tale references throughout his written works. In the novel, The Shining, references are made to ‘the rabbit hole’, and Jack Torrance wields a croquet mallet while menacing his young son. The Shining (1980), even through Stanley Kubrick’s lens, is similarly tied to Alice.

In this film, Danny is our Alice. He crosses a barrier, traveling down the long highway to the Overlook, a place, much like wonderland, in which he is held hostage by madness. Here, the adults cannot be blindly trusted. One could argue that Jack has always been an unsafe adult, but at the Overlook, his evil queen emerges fully and threatens decapitation at every turn.

Danny cannot trust his own role within the family unit.. His very presence seems to trigger his father’s madness, and his mother, while always attempting to maintain stability, is clearly wound tightly and ready to burst. Danny, through his ‘shine’, is tied to Tony (‘the little boy who lives in my mouth’). Tony shows Danny terrifying scenes of death and decay. Danny tries to convince himself that these visions are not real, but he no longer has trust in his own beliefs. Each eerie vision seems an echo of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, March Hare and Mad Hatter; frighteningly real, but unequivocally mad.

Danny reveals what we, as viewers, might experience if thrust into this unnerving looking glass world. He inevitably shuts down, becoming catatonic. He cannot continue on the journey, as Alice does. He holds no autonomy, now, and his body betrays him even further, as he resorts back into an infantile phase. Danny is lucky to have Wendy, his timid but brave White Queen to carry him back to the edge of this nightmare world. Without her, he would certainly become another installment in the never-ending tea party. After all, the great and enticing fear of the Alice tales is that we might be trapped in the madness forever.

The reality is that unreality is horror. It feels like a dream from which you can’t escape. The world doesn’t compute, and the barrier between safety and fear is merely the rushing weight of sleep. So little separates us from safety and danger, after all, and nothing seems more frightening than meeting some grinning specter that feels at home in the madness. I have always been following Alice, following the white rabbit, down into the depths of wonderland. I was never there for the tea and cookies, instead reveling in the grim and strange moments; unanswerable riddles, tidal waves of tears, weeping babies that turn into pigs. I’m still following each new Alice onto a perilous path, and trying to find that old familiar fear. Let’s be curiouser and curiouser, and embrace the lunacy. After all, isn’t it always just a dream?