Editorials
Breaking the ‘Chain’: It’s Time for a Female Leatherface
Recently I had the audacity to suggest on the Twitter dot-coms – since we’re getting yet another Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot – the new Leatherface should be female. The pushback was immediate and predictable, the reasoning behind it specious at best and sexist at actually.
All the greatest hits were played, which is an overly generous way of saying the band trotted out the same tired songs we’ve heard a thousand times before. ‘False Equivalencies’ still has a beat you can tap your foot to, but if I have to hear ‘Enter Strawman’ ever again it’ll be too soon.
The word ‘continuity’ was casually dropped at one point. Continuity. In reference to the Texas Chainsaw movies.
The Chucky series has continuity. It has a storyline spanning seven movies that is impressively cogent, given the franchise’s ability to adapt and evolve with the zeitgeist. Friday the 13th hung in there for eight movies before finally cutting itself loose and stumbling into Hell. But Leatherface doesn’t even have the same name from movie to movie. As John Squires has pointed out, the Chainsaw films have always been a slideshow of alternate universes where anything goes depending on who’s writing, who’s directing and who currently owns the rights. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but to suggest audiences would suddenly be put off by the lack of respect for some non-existent canon is laughable on its (leather) face. And if you’re going to cite Texas Chainsaw 3D as an attempt at re-establishing a timeline, I first demand you tell me exactly how old Alexandra Daddario was supposed to be.
Lest you think otherwise, someone did invoke Ghostbusters 2016 as evidence gender-swapping fictional characters can’t work, as though that movie’s problems didn’t have more to do with the man behind the camera than the women in front of it. This concern over whether a female Leatherface would ‘work’ is disingenuous. Depending on who you ask, a male Leatherface hasn’t worked in a decade or three.
The overtly second-grade-level insistence that “Leatherface can’t be girl” aside, the most galling of these arguments was an underlying implication the Texas Chainsaw series is some sort of sacred cow. Maybe the first one is, but Tobe Hooper took the cow to slaughter in 1986. Don’t read this the wrong way; I absolutely love Part 2, but that movie wasn’t about building a franchise, it was about bringing one down. That’s a good subject for a deep dive another day, but one big tip-off is the scene where Dennis Hopper repeatedly screams “I’m bringing it all down.” Even if the series was a sacred cow – the selection of the next Leatherface announced via smokestack – that shouldn’t preclude an honest conversation about seriously changing things up.
Nostalgia is great. Familiarity is fine. But Horror is at its best when it’s showing us something we’ve never seen before. Previously unexplored angles and aspects of human suffering, both psychological and physiological. New images, new ideas… New icons. The Texas Chainsaw series has struggled to bring anything new or truly noteworthy to the table for a while now, and none of this is to say making Leatherface a woman would be an instant fix. It wouldn’t. But it would provide a much-needed new opportunity to explore a truly different version of the character.
Some of the perception around ‘gender-swapping’ a character like Leatherface is mired in the misconception they would be the exact same, “but a woman now.” This is a lazy and narrow field of vision. In truth, changing Leatherface’s gender would fundamentally alter the character’s perspective and motives from the jump because the experience of a girl growing up in the environment and circumstances that created such a maniac would be vastly different than that of a boy. This is a person disfigured and damaged to the point where wearing human skin as a mask seems like the proper thing to do. While previous iterations of Leatherface likely benefitted from being raised in a family consistently depicted as highly patriarchal in nature, a female member of the Sawyer clan would have to be twice as vicious and half as vulnerable as her male counterpart to earn the acceptance of her cannibalistic kin.
What kind of person would that perfect storm of deformity, desperation and depravity create, and what would be left of whoever encountered her? This very concept is fresher and more interesting than anything these movies have done in a generation, and Kim Henkel once brought the Illuminati onboard.
Truthfully, there has been exactly one unifying theme throughout the Chainsaw series’ constant cycle of reinvention. They’re all about the horrifying concept of venturing down America’s long forgotten back roads, hidden far from public view, only to be righteously devoured by a segment of society with an axe to grind. That’s why the real question isn’t “why should Leatherface be a woman,” so much as “why isn’t Leatherface a woman?”
Photo Credit: Jason R. Sheppard @ Truehorror.net
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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