Red Kingdom Rising (2014)

Interesting facts

Red Kingdom Rising is a 2012 independent fantasy horror film written, produced and directed by Navin Dev. The film is inspired by Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking Glass. It marks Dev's first feature-length film, following on from his similarly themed fairy tale short films.

Production

Director Navin Dev was inspired by real accounts of adult survivors of child abuse and wanted to portray a symbolic, nightmarish world that evoked the psychological horrors they endured. Having researched Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Dev set the film within the fantasy horror genre as it would enable the film to be elaborated upon the mature and symbolic themes found in fairy tales.

Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and in particular, Through the Looking-Glass, were used as direct inspirations due to the ideas of dream reversal, occultism, and dream symbolism that Carroll presents in his work and that author Marc Edmund Jones elaborates on.

Production of Red Kingdom Rising was achieved on a low budget, with pre-production commencing months prior to shooting in order to design and build the complicated character make up prosthetics as well as a full scale Red Kingdom dream world. Dev undertook extensive rehearsals with his cast, familiarising them with affective memory exercises in order to reach the complexity of the troubled characters.

Visual inspirations for Red Kingdom Rising ranged from Gustav Dore’s fable paintings, artist Mark Ryden’s work, numerous graphic novels to Jaromil Jireš' 1970 film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Dev chose to shoot the film on the Super 16mm format due to its grainy and organic quality that would uphold the organic visual style of a fairy tale.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.