Editorials
The Influence of “Scooby Doo” On the Slasher Film
It’s a simple formula: take four or five teenagers, add a menacing villain, throw in several confrontations and top it all off with a chase climax where the bad guy is unmasked and/or defeated. That sums up pretty much every slasher movie from the last forty years. But long before the identities of the killers in Friday the 13th, Scream, Urban Legend, My Bloody Valentine, Sorority Row et al were revealed, one TV show was doing the same thing on a weekly basis.
On September 13, 1969, CBS broadcast the first episode of “Scooby Doo! Where Are You?,” in the process helping to create (along with the Italian Giallo films of the time) the blueprint for the modern slasher. The show’s main characters are horror movie archetypes through and through: there’s Fred Jones, the blandly handsome hero/leader; Daphne Blake, the tall, slender damsel in distress; and Velma Dinkley, the brainy nerd. And then there was of course Norville “Shaggy” Rogers and Scooby Doo, who provided the requisite comic relief. Sound familiar?
In this universe, scientists, mayors, college deans, police officers and every other person in a position of authority, right down to the parents, cannot be trusted. The local sheriff is unhelpful, corrupt or thoroughly evil, and probably has a dark secret. And the deputy is dumb enough to deny the bogeyman’s existence without first looking over his shoulder – though that’s no guarantee that he’s not the villain. Sound familiar?
Then there’s the dialogue, which consists of every single character stating the obvious. Whenever they enter a spooky house, they say, “This place is spooky!” When they find themselves trapped, they say, “We’re trapped!” When the No-Face Zombie turns out to be a robot, they say, “The No-Face Zombie was a robot!” Sound familiar?
And that brings us to the villains. For most of the running time of an episode, a “Scooby Doo” villain will appear where and when he damn well pleases, and to hell with logic. In his presence, power supplies will fail and cars refuse to start. And at the end, the villain will be unmasked, typically revealing him to be someone you wouldn’t have expected. Sound… familiar?
Not only did the modern slash film seemingly draw a whole lot of inspiration from “Scooby Doo,” but the entire sub-genre has some really interesting connections to the kid-friendly franchise.
The makers of Urban Legend (1998) in particular must’ve watched “Scooby Doo” for inspiration, because not only are Alicia Witt and Jared Leto dead ringers for Daphne and Fred but they spend the running time being surprised by a weird janitor, chased by a hooded figure and investigating suspects that have ‘red herring’ written all over them. There’s a dog named Hootie, all the adults are either incompetent or creepy, and when one character goes missing, the dean suggests he might be shacked up in a motel with a farmyard animal (see what I mean about unhelpful?). These motifs run through the entire franchise; in Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2006), Kate Mara plays another Daphne clone whose friends include a nerd, a dog-loving jock, and a stoner who owns a van with flowers on the side.
Speaking of franchises, you will not find a series that has more in common with “Scooby Doo” than Scream. We all know that Sarah Michelle Gellar (Scream 2) and Matthew Lillard (one of Scream’s masked villains) played Daphne and Shaggy in the live action movies, but did you know that David Warner, Lewis Arquette (both Scream 2) and Hayden Panettiere (Scream 4) all lent their respective vocal talents to “What’s New Scooby Doo?,” “A Pup Named Scooby Doo” and Scooby Doo! And The Goblin King?
More telling is the casting of Patrick Warburton, who played Sheriff Bronson Stone in “Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated.” The name of his Scream 3 character is Steven Stone, which is surely a coincidence… until you realize that he’s appearing in a movie where a masked villain chases characters through a mansion with revolving walls and one-way mirrors. For all the film’s attempts at nudge-wink self-awareness, it still presents its audience with characters that split up in order to search a spooky house and a villain who, when unmasked, turns out to be some guy found dead earlier in the movie. He would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.
Instead of rebooting Scream as a TV series, MTV should’ve remade The Prowler (1981), which was scripted by Neal (son of Joseph) Barbera and Glenn Leopold, who between them worked on “The New Scooby Doo Mysteries,” “Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics” and “The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo.” Needless to say, there’s a whiff of the day job as characters split up, search the local cemetery after dark and are chased down corridors by a masked assailant – although I don’t recall too many Scooby villains having their heads vaporized by a shotgun-wielding heroine. Also, if you can’t deduce that the sheriff is the killer before the end of the fourth reel, you should turn the Mystery Machine around and go home.
Even when a slasher movie doesn’t conclude with a climactic unmasking, Scooby still casts a shadow over the proceedings. It’s difficult to take Freddy Vs Jason (2003) seriously when one of the main characters is a stoner whose ride is referred to as a “Scooby van” and the local Sheriff (an incompetent goofball, obviously) is played by Garry Chalk, who was also the Vice Principal in Scooby Doo: The Mystery Begins (2009). Related side note, Chalk was also in The Fly II, where he played a character named Scorby – at one point someone actually shouts, “Scorby, where are you?”
Is this all just one big coincidence? You’d have a hard time convincing me of that!
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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