The Books
Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, were chock-full of nightmarish situations and bizarre mental imagery. The fact that the woodcut illustrations portrayed most of the human characters as hideously ugly with grotesquely large heads didn't help much, either. Examples include:- Falling all the way down, down, and down...
- The scene in Wonderland where the baby turns into a pig.
- Although it gets less scary when Alice comments that he looked better as a pig than a baby. And then goes on to think about all the children she knows who would look better as pigs than children.
- The incredibly creepy Cheshire Cat? Way more teeth than needed, and can disappear and reappear at will.
- Lampshaded by Alice, who notes that while he seems friendly (and she quickly learns that he is), his large amount of teeth and long claws are rather unnerving, prompting her to speak to him as cautiously as possible.
- Alice almost drowning in her own tears. Not only is she so traumatized by everything so far that she bursts into tears, but it almost kills her.
- The Duchess's Song which includes lyrics about beating a baby every time it sneezes, and which the Duchess sings while repeatedly shaking and tossing the baby up and down.
- Imagine living under a legal system which is based entirely on the whims of a bad tempered Jerkass who can have a person beheaded for even the slightest annoyance. And she annoys easily. While the King pardons all of the Queen's victims, he always has to do it in secret and we don't know how long it's going to last...
- The train scene in "Through The Looking Glass". Every single passenger on the train talks in unison and say the creepiest things like "poor child she should know where she is even if she can't remember her own name".
- "If that there King was to wake," added Tweedledum, "you'd go out— bang!—just like a candle!" Existential Horror. This is also a Call-Back to the first book, where Alice contemplates the same thing happening to her if she continued shrinking.
- The page's image is the Jabberwocky illustration in the original book, a horrific-looking dragon with long hairy fingers and rat-like buck teeth.
- The introduction to the Tweedles. When Alice comes across them, they just stand there, staring at her, so still and quiet that she mistakes them for mannequins. They do this for several minutes as she gets close them enough to read their names on their collars and contemplate the nursery rhyme. Then they suddenly start to talk and move. In real life, that would easily be a Jump Scare. Then there's their appearances,
◊ which can seem creepy to some, what with their little boy clothes and enlarged, caricature-like faces. - Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice he thinks she should have stopped ageing when she reached seven. She objects that one cannot prevent oneself from ageing, and he replies that she could have stopped ageing at seven if only she'd had "proper assistance"... Then there's the crash that shakes the forest just after Alice leaves Humpty behind, implying his inevitable fall off the wall. We know from the nursery rhyme that the White King's soldiers won't succeed in repairing Humpty – in short, this means he dies just seconds after his conversation with Alice ends.
- The poem Humpty recites for Alice comes off as very ominous. He relates how he sent a message to the fish asking them to do something. The fish replied that they could not, and Humpty responded with what seems to be a threat. When they try his patience, he takes a kettle (and later a corkscrew) "fit for the deed I had to do", fills the kettle while his heart pounds in his chest and heads off to the home of the fish. Three times, verses abruptly cut off (including the final line where Humpty is desperately trying to open the door) and absolutely no clarification is given as to what Humpty's request to the fish is, why it is so important to him, and what he plans to do when he gets to them.I sent to them again to say"It will be better to obey."
- The poem Humpty recites for Alice comes off as very ominous. He relates how he sent a message to the fish asking them to do something. The fish replied that they could not, and Humpty responded with what seems to be a threat. When they try his patience, he takes a kettle (and later a corkscrew) "fit for the deed I had to do", fills the kettle while his heart pounds in his chest and heads off to the home of the fish. Three times, verses abruptly cut off (including the final line where Humpty is desperately trying to open the door) and absolutely no clarification is given as to what Humpty's request to the fish is, why it is so important to him, and what he plans to do when he gets to them.
Other adaptations
- Jan Švankmajer's 1988 adaptation, especially the undead taxidermied White Rabbit.
- Dreamchild.
- Some of the animal characters in the 1972 version with Fiona Fullerton look pretty unnatural as well.
- The Cheshire Cat as portrayed in BKN's Alice in Wonderland: What's the Matter with Hatter. And you thought the McGee version was creepy. And this one's supposed to be comic relief!
- The 1985 made-for-TV version:
- The Jabberwock
- The White Queen turning into a sheep. Ironically, in the original book, the White Queen randomly turning into a sheep was a funny moment. The movie's director, on the other hand, turned it into a unexpectedly scary-looking monster.
- This anti-Drug PSA from 1971, entitled Curious Alice, that ironically is so bizarre & creepy that it seems the producers were on drugs when they made it. Scare 'Em Straight, indeed.
- Many of Lou Bunin's stop-motion puppet characters in the 1949 version are grotesque and frightening to look at.
