Editorials
[Special Feature] 11 Things Horror Movies Have Taught Me!
I recently realized something about myself that actually scares me a little bit. I don’t know if it’s because I watch too many movies — which I’m positive I do — or perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention in school so my mind is so desperate for knowledge that it’s actively seeking out information from unreliable sources, but a startling majority of what I know is stuff I’ve “learned” from movies. To me, an impromptu dance number can spring up at literally any second, you can be knocked unconscious and wake up several hours later without any trauma to your brain, and should you narrowly escape a massive explosion, all you have to do is get up and shrug it off.
So there’s a very good chance that no less than 80% of what I know is information I gleaned from films, but add to this my near obsessive love for horror films, and it’s a safe bet that roughly half of my accumulated life knowledge was taught to me by the likes of Freddy, Jason, Michael, and friends. Also, Freddy, Jason, Michael, and friends is a fantastic name for a horror sitcom. Head past the break so I can share my knowledge with you. Come on, it’ll be a learning experience for us all.
11. Do Your Research Before Buying A House
As seen in: Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, The Grudge (Ju-On)
I’m the type of guy that if I were buying a house I wouldn’t necessarily remember to ask if any murder-suicides had happened on the premises or if any rapey demons had already rented out the attic. You’d think asking about the plumbing, pipes — those could be the same thing, I don’t know — electricity and… flooring (?) would suffice, but these days it really isn’t. Do your research, people. Go to your local library and use one of those machines that have every newspaper ever printed, and you’ll be able to dig up every dirty detail about your home’s history, and if you’re lucky you might even uncover a dark secret the town would rather you didn’t know about.
10. Children Are Evil
As seen in: Pet Sematary, Orphan, The Ring (Ringu), The Shining, Village of the Damned
Now, you might be saying to yourself, Duh, Adam, of course all children are creatures that must be destroyed before they kill us all, to which I’ll reply, you sir or madam are so very correct. They’re all evil, I have no doubt about it, but they’re also everywhere. Seriously people, slow down. If humanity keeps reproducing at this pace there’s no way in hell we’re going to be able to fend off the hordes of children when they finally do decide to enslave everyone sixteen and older.
9. Ghosts Aren’t Cool
As seen in: Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Poltergeist, Grave Encounters
I have a bizarre, perhaps even borderline obsessive fascination with cemeteries. That might sound a little strange to a majority of you, but to the two or three who share my fondness for the unusual, just know that I’m sending you a virtual fist bump right now. I spent my 21st birthday in a necropolis, completely toasted I might add — that’s how bad it is. I’m the type of person who would drop literally everything to join one of those ghost hunting troops that I’m pretty sure have made it onto every television network by now. With that said, if the recent slew of ghostly-themed films has taught me anything, it’s that ghosts aren’t something to be studied; they’re something to be feared, and, if possible, sent straight to deepest festering pits of hell.
8. Never Go Ass to Mouth
As seen in: The Human Centipede
This might also fall under the No Shit category, but when you’re drunk and feeling frisky, weird sexual experiments are bound to happen. I only just watched The Human Centipede 2 a few days ago, and once the credits started rolling I couldn’t shake the feeling that I really needed a shower. After watching that stout, buggy-eyed man crudely staple the mouths of several screaming strangers to the shivering asses of the person in front of them, I felt like I could cross that off my list of weird shit I may or may not do in my life.
7. Being A Virgin Is A Good Thing
As seen in: Practically every horror movie with horny teens
There’s a downside to living a life of junk food, gaming marathons, and horror movie nights, and that’s the lack of sex people who live this life receive. Thankfully, according to all the horror movies I’ve seen, being a sex-depraved virgin is actually a good thing, because it increases your chances of living a longer life of celibacy. For those of you who don’t know what it feels like to play Call of Duty for eight hours straight while consuming nothing but Cheetos and Mountain Dew, you’re already screwed because you, well, screwed. What you need to do is hump everything that moves, because you’re going to die, so you might as well enjoy yourself.
6. Face Blindness Is A Thing
As seen in: Faces in the Crowd
My memory is awful. Like, immediately after meeting someone I’ve already forgotten their face, name, story, the clothing they wore, everything. For some reason, roughly 3-5 seconds after I’ve met someone my mind completely erases them, like they never existed.. It’s weird. Thanks to Milla Jovovich, I now have an excuse for why I can’t remember anyone, and that’s face blindness, or Prosopagnosia, a condition that just saved me from a ton of potential awkward situations when someone walks up to me, expecting me to remember them only to have their hopes dashed when they recognize my confused gaze.
5. Exorcisms Can Be Boring
As seen in: The Rite, The Devil Inside
When I think of exorcisms, I imagine Regan crawling down the stairs backward, or spewing green pea soup like she just watched a man staple mouths to asses for ten minutes. What doesn’t come to mind is all the mundane filler that can be found in some recent exorcism films. If the recent slew of boring-as-hell exorcism flicks is any indication, there’s a chance that not all exorcisms are film worthy events.
4. Tires Are Terrifying
As seen in: Rubber
Now I have to add tires to my growing list of things that make me want to curl up and die, right up there with hospitals and the sound vacuum cleaners make. The scariest thing about Rubber, a French horror-comedy flick that asked the important question: What if a tire could fucking kill people? The answer is a resounding yes, so long as said tire has superpowers or is attached to a car.
3. …But Not As Terrifying As Clowns
As seen in: It, that creepy clown doll from Poltergeist, Captain Spaulding in House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects
I don’t think I need to expand too much on this, because this just a fact: clowns are the most terrifying things on the planet. Forget spiders, war, and politicians, because clowns are always terrifying, and always hungry for your innocent soul. Now, you could argue that some freakish clown/politician/spider hybrid would be scarier, but that’s just silly. That could never exist, right? Right?
2. It Actually Is Important To Wash Your Hands
As seen in: Contagion (Before you start commenting on how this isn’t a horror movie, I’m going to beat you to it by saying you’re certifiably insane if you don’t think this is a terrifying film)
Admit it, you don’t always wash your hands after using the restroom. Maybe you were in a hurry, or you forgot, or something distracted you on your way from the stall to the bathroom door. Sometimes you just forget, right? You fell into my trap — I got you to admit you don’t wash your hands! You disgust me.
Oh, and wash your hands or you and everyone you love will die.
1. Have A Camera On You At All Times
As seen in: Grave Encounters, Apollo 18, Atrocious, Paranormal Activity 3, [REC]/Quarantine, Trollhunter
Some people watch flicks like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project for entertainment, but I use them as research. Like it or not, the found footage subgenre is huge. Oren Peli’s a trillionaire after he decided to start filming the ghosts that haunted his apartment (also, none of that last sentence is true), so when scary, unexplainable things start happening to me I’m going to make sure I’m adequately prepared for it. If I hear even the slightest of noises I always have a camera team ready to film the source from no less than five different angles. I suggest you do the same.
Toss Adam an email, or follow him on Twitter and Bloody Disgusting
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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