Editorials
Monster Kid Theater: John Carpenter’s ‘Christine’
Monster Kid Theater is an ongoing column in which my three sons and I (just call me Fred MacMurray) get together to watch classic and contemporary monster movies. My trio of tots are young. Jack is 10. Elliot is 8. Ben is 6. I have not really pushed a cinematic agenda on them. They have just liked hanging out with me, I guess. And as I watch plenty of movies and make movies and move in those circles, it just goes to follow that they will follow.
Many of the movies I watch are naturally a bit odd by “normal” (whatever that means) parent standards, but I have ensured that when we do sit down to watch movies and when we go to the cinema, that I try to spin everything into education. I break down shots, discuss film history, talk about special effects, acting, metaphor and allegory and the use of music. Some of it they get, some they will eventually get. Some they just ignore, in fact.
But they are my joy. We are a team.
Over the past few years on this column’s previous home at ComingSoon.net, I have written about the lads watching everything from the original The Fly and its black and white sequel, a triple bill of Aliens, The Thing and War of the Worlds, Kong Skull Island and Alex Kurtzman’s recent The Mummy. Recently we watched a slightly censored version of Fright Night and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But this week, I want to discuss a recent screening of John Carpenter’s 1983 Stephen King adaptation Christine, a seemingly overly intense choice for a trio of tots, but – with a few choice on-the-fly edits – a film whose aesthetics, music and simplified narrative and character arcs proved magnetic and likely will serve as a definitive entertainment that they will take with them.
Now, I have been preaching the glories of John Carpenter to them since they were old enough to care. Not screening the films (though Jack has seen Escape from New York) but playing Carpenter’s elemental yet revolutionary synth soundtrack music. They can recognize every key theme and I have been forced to relate basic plot details to them about all the movies. But more than that, I have spoken about Carpenter’s influences and artistry, how all his music is built on simple time signatures and progressions and is employed chiefly to create a brooding blanket of mood. And when it came to driving – where most of these lessons take place, in the car – Christine was an obvious favorite. Ben especially thrilled to the idea of a sentient, haunted car marauding around as a kind of bully-hunting avenging angel. He has long loved the poster image of the bright red Plymouth Fury bathed in that signature ’80s blue backlight and 2 years ago, even re-named his Lightning McQueen toy Christine, taking a marker to other dinky cars to make them as red as the mythical monster car that existed in a film he was not allowed to watch. And Jack? Well, Hell. He’s a musician, violin is his thing, but he learned how to play that pulsing theme note-for-note on my synth.
Which brings us to now.
The three lads invited Jack’s friend Seth over for a sleepover and they demanded a film for the evening’s “movie club”. They wanted something cool and creepy and it was decided that they were ready for Christine. I agreed. In fact, I had just returned from the Frightmare in the Falls convention in Niagara Falls, where I hosted the Q&A with actor Malcolm Danare (who played chubby lackey Moochie) and we both agreed that really, Christine is not a particularly violent movie. It’s not mean or gratuitous and the only blood comes on-screen from poor glass-sliced Arnie (Keith Gordon) at the film’s metal-crunching climax. Sure, there are a few victims that get taken down by Christine, but hey, they’re bullies. Bad guys. Like, really, really bad. So they get their just desserts. EC comics style. And since the kids adore EC comics, I figured we were A-OK.
So huddled together with popcorn and lava lamps pulsing around us, we settled in to groove on a movie that couldn’t possibly live up to the hype their old man had ladled liberally on them for most of their young lives.
Now, again, these kids not only know every note of the score, they know the songs that Carpenter infused into the very DNA of the movie, from George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” to Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” to The Viscount’s snarling version of the sax-fueled “Harlem Nocturne”. So really, to them, Christine played like one long, slick and stylish rock video, a highlight reel of badass music propelled by sound and anchored by an almost fairy-tale-like, easily accessable morality.
Now, the BIG problem with Christine is that endless wave of profanity that spews from the mouths of its characters, in particular the vile Buddy Repperton (William Ostrander) whose use of foul language is the punctuation to his aggressive, cruel and psychotic behavior. Thankfully, I know every beat of the movie and every line of dialogue. So I sat there, ever-alert, muting and muting and muting every off-color syllable. It was exhausting. But really, the problem with doing that (outside of arthritic digits) is that the kids already know these words anyway. And when you remove them, they imagine even WORSE words and it becomes larger than what it is. It’s censorship 101: deny an audience something, make it “dangerous” and they think it’s worse than it is and they only want it more. But as I knew no other way around it, I continued to cut them bad swears out until it felt like we were watching a clumsily cut ’80s TV broadcast.
Regardless, the kids loved the movie. They found it exciting and interesting. But they weren’t emotionally affected by it. Elliot mentioned that he really didn’t care about anyone in the movie…except for the car. He’s kind of right. Though Christine boasts a first-rate cast, it’s a one-dimensional, comic book version of King through and through. That devilish Fury is both the hero and the horror of the story and when “she” is crushed, it’s actually sad, with Christine valiantly trying to reshape her truck-smooshed body to no avail. It’s a monster truck rally as high opera. Beautiful.
Christine is not a scary movie either, and when film was over, it was over. The kids had no talking points. They weren’t spooked or shaken. Our special guest sleepover kid concurred that “it’s not a horror movie at all…but it sure is awesome!”.
The next morning they all got up and asked to hear the soundtrack while they milled around and ate breakfast and played pinball (I collect vintage tables so the lads live in a mini-retro arcade). Jack asked when we could watch more Stephen King movies so before we dropped the other kid home, I popped up Stand by Me. And holy Hell, did my thumb get a workout pummeling the mute button on that one…sheesh.
Monster Kid Theater will return…
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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