Movies
Deranged
“Add some Hammer style blood and you have the original tale that may have inspired the entire slasher genre.”
Ezra Cobb – Ed Gein – what’s the difference? None. Now sit down next to dead momma and have some dinner. Deranged is a 1974 slasher film depicting the life of Ezra Cobb. It is also the true story of Ed Gein – the real killer whose maniacal behavior inspired several horror stories, including the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Herschell Gordon Lewis may be the Godfather of Gore, and Elvis Presley the King of Rock and Roll – but Ed Gein is the granddaddy who inspired decades of slasher films that you are still watching to this day.
Ezra Cobb (Ed Gein) was a lonely man – and learning of his story may even stir up feelings of pity for this corpse loving, lost soul, who really had no place in the world. Living alone with his mother on a farm for several years, she becomes ill, crippled by a stroke and bed ridden. Ezra brings her some “good and hot” soup regularly. His mom is his life – and one day, while feeding her pea soup, she croaks, spewing hot red blood out of her nose. Ezra is left lost, lonely, and without anything to live for. He buries his mother, and spends a year in the quiet house, with nobody to talk to, nothing to relate to. Just absence. Enough to make any man’s mind melt into mania.
Isolation and lack of purpose can cause a severe mess in the brain. The mind is driven by purpose and social relations, and when the two are void from an existence, as in Ed Gein’s case, you have the devil’s playground. Many of history’s infamous mass murderers had relationships with mothers who were miles from typical. This mom engraved visions of pus filled sluts where love and femininity should have been cultivated. In Deranged, Ezra, even when confronted with moments of normal lust or accompaniment, bugs out remembering momma’s words of how “the wages of sin are syphilis, gonorrhea and death”. Its a systematic thought process engrained into Ezra which means, bottom line – give Ezra wood, and you’re going to die.
Several of the supporting characters in this film help Ezra look normal. The policeman who pulls him over is hard not to laugh at. The fat woman who he befriends – who talks to her dead husband – makes Ezra seem like the normal guy at the table. Everything that surrounded Ezra in this film, and perhaps Ed Gein in reality, was warped. Take a warped environment, his upbringing, and his simplicity, and mix it together, and you come up with a lonely man who starts to hear voices in his head – hell we all do when isolated and left without purpose – only Ezra hears his mom’s voice telling him to dig her up and bring her home. So he does.
And thus begins the tale of absurdity and disgust – as Ezra begins to gather body parts from the cemetery to enhance his mother and his home. Guts for violin strings. Bones for table legs. When Ezra says he can play the skins, he doesn’t mean he can play the drums. That’s human skin there he’s beating with that “drumstick” (a femur). And as momma rots and falls apart, he cuts off skin and faces and tries them on and pretty much has tea parties, filling his life and home with company and furnishings literally made by “hand”.
Such is the true tale of Ed Gein. Ed became the inspiration for several fictional spin-offs that personified his behavior as characters. Leatherface, the most notorious of them all, is based on Ed Gein. Just looking at the dinner scene in Deranged, you can see hints of what was to come in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise – the dinner parties with mom and all her corpsy friends. Some people have imaginary friends to fill the void – Ezra just checked the obituaries for his future houseguests.
Personal satisfactions that this particular 1974 film may offer to the average horror fan? Tom Savini’s first film! Savini on special fx always guarantees above-average quality gore, and is a great teaser montage of the master in his early days. There’s laughable psycho behavior everywhere, from the town policeman to the lonely fat woman. The blood is Hammer red, and although the corpses are quite waxen looking, and wounds fail to be displayed as per the norm of nowadays, the blood running from mama’s nose, the skull crushing beatings with the femur, and the gore dripping, gutted naked corpse of a hot victim should satisfy. Much along the lines of Don’t Go in the Basement, weirdoes left and right will keep your eyes attached to the commotion on the screen – none more creepily stranger or suspect than the narrator – the “newspaper columnist” – who tells this story ala Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling. While poor old Ezra is wallowing in his own loneliness in the next room, deafened by silence, writing sad letters to his absent beloved mother – single camera shots pan into the hallway where this “newspaper columnist” lurks, enlightening viewers to the methods behind Ezra’s madness. Who’s the psycho here?
Final analysis: If you’d like to learn the true story of Ed Gein, the man that inspired the character of Leatherface, there is no more enjoyable way to do so than watching Deranged. Doing so will enlighten you on how NOT to live your life, how not to bring up your son – and in all honesty, may make you question how much of a “victim” Ezra himself is, being such a product of the environment he was raised in. Add some Hammer style blood and you have the original tale that may have inspired the entire slasher genre. Educate yourself and watch this film. Remember people – these tales of extreme horror are fictionally spun off of a true story – a real, everyday killer, Ed Gein. The more you know and learn, the less likely it is that you’ll end up with another man wearing your face.
I first heard about The Mandela Catalogue through a couple of nephews who were obsessed with the ARG’s sinister mythology. It was only after watching Wendigoon’s in-depth analysis of the series that I realized just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
In fact, I’d already been exposed to the nightmarish visuals of Alex Kister’s YouTube creation for years at that point without even realizing that it was the origin of several viral “cursed images” and spooky memes that had leaked into the wider internet – with this viral element actually being a part of the Catalogue’s overarching narrative.
Flash-forward to 2026 and the unprecedented success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has led to Hollywood betting on horrific internet properties with existing fanbases, which means that Kister’s unique hybrid of both religious and analog horror is finally headed to the big screen with a script written by Kister himself alongside Tyler Clifton.
While this news shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing success of The Mandela Catalogue (both myself and Wendigoon having previously predicted that the series would inevitably make the jump to theaters one day), plenty of horror fans are likely confused as to why so many folks are excited for what appears to be a Hollywood adaptation of a series of creepy .jpeg images under a VHS filter.
With that in mind, today I’d like to invite fellow readers to accompany me as I explore the origins of Alex Kister’s viral hit and attempt to explain exactly why we should all be excited about the Mandela Catalogue adaptation!
From High School Writing Project to Internet Horror Phenomenon
The first seeds of The Mandela Catalogue were sown when Kister was still in high school and developed a writing project subverting religious tropes in a world where biblical history had been altered by demonic forces. A little while later, Kister came across an analog horror contest on Reddit and decided to adapt his ideas into a standalone video where he would edit a religious kids’ cartoon –The Beginner’s Bible: The Nativity, to be specific- into something far creepier. This is how the iconic Overthrone video was born, with this viral short film taking on a life of its own as fans demanded more eerie content from Kister.
Though the video was originally meant to be a one-and-done sort of affair, with Kister actually regretting some of its primitive visuals and considering the editing amateurish and “YouTube-Poop-like” when compared to his current standards, fan reaction and free time during the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the (then) seventeen-year-old filmmaker to continue producing content set in this same world. The Mandela Catalogue name was inspired by the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, as the series would slowly begin to explore the subtle horror of alternate histories.
Inspired by existential dread brought on by extended periods of quarantine as well as a personal crisis of faith, Kister continued to expand his alternate timeline where the rise of Christianity had been prevented by what was presumably the Devil disguised as the Archangel Gabriel. This alternate course of fictional events led to the existence of certain paranormal anomalies that had come to be accepted as “normal” by the 1990s, which is why most of the series’ supernatural horror is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner.
Most of this background information and religious lore is delivered by increasingly cryptic broadcasts and in-universe PSAs, as well as the occasional found footage video, that often have to be decoded by clever viewers. Of course, it’s the consistently disturbing imagery that made the series so popular – much of which was originally created by Kister on a smartphone!
The Alternates: Horror’s Most Unsettling Modern Monsters
The show’s early episodes mostly take place within the fictional Mandela County in Wisconsin and depict life in a world where demonic entities are capable of using media to enter our reality. This process usually involves scaring victims into killing themselves and then repurposing their bodies as horrific doppelgangers referred to as “Alternates”. This terrifying phenomenon has become so common that local police already have specialized procedures in place to deal with the issue, though this usually consists of simply ignoring calls for help so as to avoid spreading so-called “Metaphysical Awareness Disorder” any further.
Over time, Kister would expand this mythology and incorporate different kinds of Alternates into the mix, though the story never stopped deconstructing religious concepts. The series’ second volume exponentially increased both video quality and the overall narrative scope as we began to follow the lives of characters who had already grown up in this dystopian hellscape where the government is forced to prohibit religion, television, and even mirrors in the hopes of mitigating the damage done by the ongoing invasion of otherworldly entities.
The really interesting part comes into play when you realize exactly how the Alternates make use of scary media in order to spread their demonic influence, with the analog horror of it all being a diegetic part of the story and something of a memetic trap orchestrated by the false Gabriel.
I particularly appreciate how some characters begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with their version of reality and that things weren’t meant to play out this way, especially when Mark utters the haunting line “who have I been praying to all this time?” That’s why I think The Mandela Catalogue is an effective piece of religious horror even if you don’t subscribe to the Christian worldview, as the mere idea of a world where evil has already won is a universally terrifying concept in and of itself. Not only that, but the series’ uncanny analog imagery alone is already worth the price of admission, as you’ve likely already noticed by looking at the pictures accompanying this article.
Why The Feature Adaptation Could Be Horror’s Next Big Success
It’s actually been a whole year since Kister first announced that he had been working on a feature-length screenplay for a Mandela Catalogue movie since 2022, with his proposed story following an ensemble of high-school graduates who uncover a supernatural conspiracy after the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student. This premise sounds similar to narrative elements present in the series’ second volume, but I’m pretty sure that Kister is going to go the Kane Parsons route and make the movie more of a spin-off than a re-imagining of its source material.
While notable Hollywood producers like Aaron B. Koontz, Scott Stuber, and Steven Spielberg himself are backing the upcoming project, I feel like there’s no one better to adapt this deeply personal exploration of faith and the dark side of communication than the person who first came up with it. That’s why I can’t wait to see Kister’s work on the big screen, as I have a feeling that this young filmmaker is the next one on the list about to make cinematic history – especially since this is clearly a passion project that has been in the works for years at this point!
That being said, there’s always a chance that the film could end up unleashing a fresh wave of Alternate incursions, but I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.
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