Editorials
[Good Scenes In Bad Movies] The ‘Ghost Ship’ Edition!!!
Another confession. In addition to the House Of Wax remake from last week’s article, I’ve never seen the Ghost Ship either. By most accounts it is terrible. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean every single frame of it is bad! I know there are plenty of moments I love in otherwsie sh*tty movies. And that’s precisely the point The Wolfman (@TheWolfmanCometh – on the boards) aims to illustrate here in his first column for Bloody-Disgusting!
We’re going to, on occasion, start examining decent scenes in otherwise bad movies. And we hope you’ll come along for the ride! Head inside for his take on Ghost Ship!
If you’ve seen this movie before, you know the exact scene that I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen this movie before, then I know a great way for you to spend the next few minutes. HINT: it’s to read this article! Maybe I’ve seen John Carpenter’s The Fog one too many times, but man, isn’t the ocean creepy? Whether you think about all the monsters that could be hiding in its vastness or you think about all the people who have died at sea and are looking for a reason to come back and spook you, there’s something inherently creepy about the ocean’s endlessness. If you take that spookiness and throw in an abandoned, haunted cruise ship, what could possibly go wrong?! Pretty much everything, other than the opening scene.
Tell you what, I’m going to tell you who the main actors in this movie are, and I’ll let you fill in the year it was made. Juliana Marguiles, Gabriel Byrne, and Ron Eldard. You probably even only know two of those people, and you’ll also know those two actors hit their prime in the late 90’s, so you’d be right to assume this movie took place after their fall from grace in the early 2000’s. Juliana Marguiles and Ron Eldard are pirates, which makes perfect sense because when I think of pirates, I think of that one kind of pretty woman who I saw in ER. Anyways, this gang of salvagers is given information on this floating cruise ship and of course, the crew investigates. Rather than easily finding gold, they find ghosts and all the crew hallucinates and Julianna Marguiles is the only one to survive, and we realize that the source of the information on this haunted ship came from a character similar to Charon from Greek mythology. Charon’s job was to provide souls to Hell, so the character that informed our beloved crew is some sort of immortal who has been leading souls to their own demise for as long as we can all imagine. Doesn’t sound that bad on paper, does it? That’s probably because it took you two minutes to read, rather than watch this 90 minute pile of garbage.
I thought there was only one memorable thing about this movie, but according to the internet, there are two memorable things. While all of the crew was having hallucinations and visions, one woman in a red dress made frequent appearances. Not only did this woman remove her clothing in this movie, but more notably, seduced multiple men to their deaths. One of these deaths was a scene where she is just so sexy that one of the crew lunges towards her, but seeing as she’s just a ghost, he falls right through her and down an elevator shaft. Yes, female readers, some men are really THAT desperate that we will lunge towards naked women, even if they’re standing on the edge of an elevator shaft. Through my own personal blog, I’ve found that lots of people search the internet for “woman in the red dress”, so it seems some people took a different something different from this cinematic atrocity. What stood out for me? Why, the incredibly violent opening scene, of course!
Considering we have an abandoned, haunted cruise ship, we need to know what happened to everyone on board. The film starts with a dinner party in the 1960’s with a bunch of rich people acting like rich idiots. Wearing fancy clothes, drinking fancy drinks, and probably sexually harassing women and trying to take away their right to vote. Maybe some of that stuff is just implied, but I digress. Running around the amidst the rich old people is a little girl who starts to dance with an old man. While these rich people are celebrating, we see an unknown individual messing around with some wire cables and a wench that’s pulling the cable taught. The people keep dancing, the cable gets pulled tighter and tighter against two poles trying to hold it back, but eventually those poles give way and that metal cable slices through the entire dance floor. All the dancers freeze, seemingly confused by what just happened. When the little girl looks up at the old man, she sees his wine glass fall in half, which is when the audience realizes every person on the dance floor has been sliced in half, and the top halves of everyone just kind of slide off the bottom half and plop on the dance floor. NOW THAT’S HOW YOU START A MOVIE! Granted, when you look at the aftermath of all the body parts on the floor, there are arms and heads and torsos laying there, which is a little confusing. I’m no rocket surgeon, but I would think that everyone would just be cut laterally through their torso, so the only explanation for all the diagonal cuts through some individuals is that there was some SERIOUS dancing going on back in the 1960’s, or that maybe this was a cruise specifically for breakdancers. Now THAT’S an episode of “Mad Men” I can’t wait to see! The infamous breakdancing craze of 1968!
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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