Editorials
Good Or Bad? When a Movie Franchise Changes Direction
Horror franchises typically produce diminishing returns as they go on, both creatively and financially. Once a film studio realizes they have a hit on their hands, they quickly start to churn out sequels at a rapid pace in an attempt to make as much money as possible while the franchise is still popular. When a studio has realized that they have milked a franchise for all it is worth, they sometimes try to try a fresh approach and make an installment that is completely different than what came before it. Other times, studios will try to get ahead of themselves and not make a sequel that is just more of the same. Several of the biggest franchises in horror movie history have attempted this approach, so we thought we would take a look at some of them and see what worked and what didn’t about those films. As many of you may know, sometimes people just want more of the same. If a film strays from the formula too much (as is the case with films like Halloween III: Season of the Witch and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), the backlash from audiences and box office returns* may be so severe that the studio decides to go right back to what they were doing before.
*All box office returns listed below have been adjusted for inflation. So the $22.9 million Friday the 13th: A New Beginning made in 1985 will be written in 2015 dollars: $50.6 million. An inflation calculator was used to convert the numbers.
Remove the Villain
What do you do when you supposedly permanently kill off the centerpiece of your franchise but still want to make a sequel? Leave them out! The two biggest examples (and possibly only, if I’m not mistaken) of this are the aforementioned Halloween III: Season of the Witch and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Both films were critically maligned at the times of their release and brought in significantly less box office than their predecessors.
Let’s look at the reasoning behind these films. in 1984, Paramount Pictures was looking to end their beloved slasher franchise which, at the time, had only been around for four years. After touting Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter as, you guessed it, the final chapter in the Friday the 13th series, they thought they would be done with the franchise. Unfortunately (or fortunately from a monetary standpoint), The Final Chapter would go on to gross $75.3 million domestically, making it the third-highest grossing film in the franchise (the highest would be the original film, with $114 million). Paramount couldn’t pass up an opportunity to make another sequel, but they had just killed off their star villain. Their idea was to create a new trilogy without Jason, but still center it around Friday the 13th. Unfortunately, ill will was created between Paramount and audiences when they didn’t make that fact very clear. The trailer legitimately promises Jason’s return, something audiences wouldn’t get until 1986.
Needless to say, audiences were not happy. Despite the fact that the film boasts the highest body count in the franchise (a whopping 21 deaths), the highest amount of bare breasts (director Danny Steinmann got his start in the porn industry) and the most frequent use of drugs, it couldn’t make up for the fact that Jason wasn’t in the film. Maybe fan response would have been better if the advertisements hadn’t been so misleading, but it’s possible fans were never going to accept a Friday the 13th movie without Jason Voorhees.
What is mind-boggling about the direction A New Beginning takes is that a spin-off was heavily insinuated at the end of The Final Chapter, with little Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) giving a mischievous look to the camera in the film’s final shot. Rather than go the logical route and follow Tommy’s descent into madness in A New Beginning, the film makes an abrupt departure and has the killer by a random ambulance driver Roy, who snapped after seeing the corpse of his mentally handicapped son.
The film isn’t highly regarded among horror fans and critics alike, and it’s not difficult to understand why. Overall, the film doesn’t really work. I still find it enjoyable, but this is clearly a case when trying something new didn’t work out for a film franchise. A New Beginning will forever be the red-headed stepchild of the Friday the 13th franchise. While it does have somewhat of a cult following among Friday fans, it’s too often looked over in
The same can be said of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. After Halloween II took in less than half of the original Halloween‘s budget ($66.7 million to the original’s massive $171.5 million), director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill thought it would be a good idea to turn the franchise into an anthology series. This may have seemed like a good idea (and judging by the quality of the sequels after Season of the Witch, I think it was), but once again, audiences just walked out pissed off. What is odd about their reaction though is that Universal made it blatantly obvious in their advertisements that Michael Myers would not, in fact, be in the film.
Halloween III received largely negative reviews upon its release, though recently it has developed somewhat of a cult following. At the time though, it was pretty much hated by everyone and ended up only bringing in $35.5 million domestically.
Halloween III separates itself from the first two films in the Halloween franchise much better than Friday the 13th: A New Beginning separates itself from the first three films in the Friday the 13th franchise. It’s capable of standing on its own and it’s also a better film. It’s no Halloween, to be sure, but it’s still a solid film that has aged well, which is more than can be said for Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.
Still, box office returns at the time of each film’s release suggest that removing the villain from a franchise is not the best thing to do if you want the film to make money. Since the victims typically rotate in those films, the villain is the only constant in a franchise. If you remove that, then your audience has no relationship to anything in the film. Had those films come out today, audiences probably still would have been disappointed, which is why future horror franchises haven’t attempted this again. Scream switches out its villains, but at the end of the day it’s still Ghostface. Saw, which contains seven films in its franchise killed off its villain at the end of its third installment, but kept him around in flashbacks for the remaining four films.
Overall, it’s probably not a great idea to go this route when deciding to move the franchise in a new direction.
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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