Gardens & The Gothic | Cinematic Gardens & the Subconscious: Nature, Symbolism, & the Psyche on Film

Name: Gardens & The Gothic | Cinematic Gardens & the Subconscious: Nature, Symbolism, & the Psyche on Film
Start: 2025-10-05T10:30:00+02:00
Location: Vallée De La Pétrusse

Schedule

Sun, 05 Oct, 2025 at 10:30 am

UTC+02:00

Location

Vallée De La Pétrusse | Luxembourg, LU

🗩 English
📍LUGA Science Hub
🎫 Free Entry
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Throughout the history of cinema, gardens, parks, courtyards, and other green spaces have been far more than mere backdrops or locations. They have served as places where desires, anxieties, and fantasies are expressed, and where meaning is sought—whether in tranquil sanctuaries or in labyrinths shrouded in mystery. At the same time, these spaces showcase nature shaped and cultivated by human intervention alongside areas left wild and untamed, thus highlighting the tension between order and chaos.
Whether it’s the walled garden in The Secret Garden (1993) reflecting grief and self-discovery, the suburban lawns in Broken Flowers (2005) signaling social status, the ornate château grounds in Last Year at Marienbad (1961) twisting time and memory, the colonial plots in The New World (2005) exposing power structures between settlers and Indigenous people, or the Japanese garden in K*ll Bill (2003) becoming a stylized battleground—gardens in cinema have always mirrored deeper social realities or emotional states, serving as windows into the subconscious.
Addressed to both film enthusiasts and garden lovers, this series explores the role and symbolism of cinematic gardens in four lectures: Gardens & Power, Gardens & Love, Gardens & Crime, and Gardens & The Gothic.
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Part Four : Gardens & The Gothic (20/06)
In films that blend fantasy and horror, gardens often adopt a distinctly Gothic quality, becoming liminal spaces where rational order unravels, and the subconscious takes hold.
In Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), a bizarre garden overflowing with giant plants and surreal creatures, mirrors Alice’s struggle with identity and belonging. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) entwines a woodland maze with the brutal historical reality of Francoist Spain, weaving supernatural elements into the horrors of war seen through the eyes of a child, and Edward Scissorhands (1990) uses elaborate topiaries to reflect the protagonist’s fragile sense of self as an outsider in suburban America.
Beyond these enchanting yet unsettling visions, horror cinema takes the concept even further. In Pet Sematary (1989), a seemingly ordinary burial plot distorts the notion of laying loved ones to rest, hinting at a sinister bond between life, death, and the earth itself, and Annihilation (2018) showcases distorted, mutated plant life, drifting between mesmerizing beauty and existential horror.