On September 25, Netflix launched the third and remaining season of its standard Japanese sci-fi thriller sequence Alice in Borderland. The present’s protagonist, the lonely, video-game obsessed Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) is trapped in a dystopian model of Tokyo (…the Borderland) alongside his pals as they’re compelled to take part in a sequence of sadistic video games styled after numerous playing cards from a deck. Primarily, the present serves up gnarly, blood-soaked kills and continuous cliffhangers a la Squid Sport, wrapped up in rapid-fire riddle-dialogues. Each episode has the narrative ebb and stream one sometimes associates with a well-made, high-concept online game. That is as near ‘gamified’ tv as you’ll ever get.

And but, much more than video video games, the principal stylistic affect on the present is (as its title suggests) Lewis Carroll. A number of characters are named after their Carrollian counterparts — Arisu himself is Alice, after all. His fellow participant, ally and later, romantic curiosity, Yuzuha Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) corresponds to the White Rabbit (usagi is rabbit in Japanese). The enigmatic participant calling himself Chishiya is the Cheshire Cat, and so forth. It’s unbelievable that the ebook that continues to encourage creators and artistes from around the globe goes to finish 160 years quickly: Alice in Wonderland (first printed in November 1865). Movies, books, TV reveals, video video games; Carroll’s iconic work has quietly influenced an entire lot of twenty first century popular culture, throughout media.

I used to be first uncovered to a Carroll-inspired work in my teen years, within the early 2000s, when the action-adventure online game American McGee’s Alice was getting rave evaluations for its imaginative character re-interpretations from Alice in Wonderland and By the Trying-Glass (1871). American McGee’s Alice (and its sequel) offered gamers with a grim, pessimistic model of Carroll’s world, and had them navigate the heroine by way of a sequence of monstrous creatures and tough puzzles which, in true Carrollian trend, deployed rhyming verses and wordplay. In 2007, the British comics writer-artist Bryan Talbot launched Alice in Sunderland, an experimental work of graphic non-fiction which explored Carroll’s hyperlinks with the historical past of north-east England’s Sunderland space — in addition to broader themes of myth-making and storytelling. One of the fascinating sections of this ebook explores how Carroll mined native myths and legends, and tweaked them for a juvenile viewers. Jabberwocky’s character, for instance, has sure frequent parts with ‘the Lambton worm’ legend, indigenous to the area.

As we speak’s streaming period has seen a number of TV reveals borrowing from the Alice in Wonderland lore. The Batman universe’s minor-villain pair Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum and the extra outstanding supervillain the Mad Hatter, who speaks in rhyming couplets like his Carrollian namesake. On the Fox TV sequence Gotham (2014-19), the Mad Hatter was performed by a suitably deranged-looking Benedict Samuel (Owen from The Strolling Lifeless, 2010-22). The Resident Evil movie franchise (2002-16), too, has a number of storylines impressed by Carroll’s work, as does the cult thriller sequence Misplaced (2004-10), which named its third-season finale ‘By the Trying-Glass’.

Alice in Borderland succeeds in presenting these perennially standard characters in new-old, novel-but-recognisable skins. In many of the aforementioned books, movies and reveals , the Carrollian affect was used to indicate thriller or intrigue. …Borderland makes a acutely aware option to lean into the horror facets of Carroll as a substitute — basically, a higher-budget model of the identical transfer American McGee’s Alice did all these years in the past. In the direction of the tip of season 2, one of many villains tells Arisu, ‘Life is only a recreation that we play with ourselves’ and that line neatly summarises the nihilistic world view of …Borderlands.

Then, is the beloved kids’s basic Alice in Wonderland secretly a horror story? The reply is each sure and no. Carroll wished to maneuver away from the preachiness of his period’s kids’s literature. He believed kids didn’t want safety or condescension from their books, along with the adults of their lives. He needed to create a textual content utilizing arithmetic, logic, puzzles alongside nonsense verse and pantomime silliness — the polarity was quite the purpose. Subsequently, if grownup readers discover horror in these tales it’s due to the unvarnished weirdness of Carroll’s characters, which he refused to dumb down for the youngsters.

Carroll would have quite loved Alice in Borderland, particularly the scene the place a personality is compelled to hack off their very own leg as a way to survive.

The author and journalist is engaged on his first ebook of non-fiction.