Editorials
High School is Hell: 10 Worst School Dances in Horror
Navigating high school is terrifying in and of itself, so it’s no surprise that it’s a frequent setting in horror. The teen angst, the hormones, and the complicated social development means a vast potential for emotional trauma. In high school, everything seems like a huge deal, especially school dances. The pressure to not only find a date but have a perfect time can be nerve-wracking. Throw in murderers, demons, killer cheerleaders, and more, and you have the making for addictive horror. Now that spring is here, so is prom season, the biggest school dance of them all. As a reminder that things can always be worse, we look back at some of the most horrific school dances in horror history:
Carrie (1976)
The quintessential horror movie prom to end all proms, and one hell of a final act. Carrie White’s high school life is rougher than most; her religious fanatic of mother has sheltered her to the point where she thinks she’s dying when she gets her first period. It only furthers the extreme bullying she deals with on a consistent basis. Then she discovers a new telekinetic ability, a liberating power that’s also in conflict with her mother’s beliefs. Attending the prom with dreamboat Tommy Ross is supposed to be the one thing that feels normal, but bully Chris Hargensen and jerk boyfriend Billy Nolan ruined that by dumping pig’s blood on her, causing Carrie to understandably snap and unleash a vengeance unlike any other. Prom is a major moment for any high schooler, and Carrie elevates that rite of passage metaphor to nightmarish levels.
Tragedy Girls
High school seniors McKayla and Sadie are social media obsessed BFFs who deftly balance dance committee, cheerleading, and serial killing aspirations with ease. Being the overachievers that they are, they’re not just content to pick off victims one by one; they want to really make a name for themselves by staging a large-scale massacre. When you’re a high school senior, the easy choice would be prom. For most, prom would be the night of hopes and dreams of romance coming to fruition. But for McKalya and Sadie, it’s a harrowing test of friendship, mayhem, and bloodshed.
Trick or Treat (1986)
Another horror film to showcase the growing pains and tribulations of being a high school outcast, Trick or Treat swaps out the prom for a Halloween school dance. For Eddie Weinbauer, heavy metal is his escape from the horrors of high school. Especially his idol, musician Sammi Curr. When reports of Sammi’s death in a mysterious fire breaks, Eddie is devastated. A local DJ gives Eddie a copy of Sammi’s last unreleased album, and soon realizes something is off about the album. Sammi has murderous plans from beyond the grave, and he means to have Eddie help him carry them out. Of course, Sammi’s heavy metal rage builds to a climax that takes place during the Halloween dance.
Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever
While the first film felt apropos of its title, this sequel revolves entirely around the high school prom. Rider Strong’s character from the first film, Paul, reappears just long enough to spread his infection to the creek where its water is distributed to the local high school, when prom planning is well underway. The high school stereotypes, such as the nice guy with the unrequited crush, are all there, just with an added layer of gross-out infection added to the mix. Prom and high school horror goes hand in hand, but this Ti West directed sequel ensures this prom is anything but glamorous.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Before the hit TV show, there was the 1992 film on which the series was based. Stereotypical cheerleader Buffy Summers rises above her shallow, materialistic nature with the new responsibility of becoming The Slayer, the chosen one destined to kill vampires. It’s a new direction that places her at odds with her friends; they don’t recognize the person she’s become. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, this teen vampire movie takes a far more light-hearted approach than Whedon had in mind, causing him to leave the project and eventually create the Buffy he intended a few years later. Even still, this version of Buffy is a lot of fun, building into a slapstick finale that take place at the school dance. Buffy kicking vampire butt in tulle and leather is great.
Jennifer’s Body
This Karyn Kusama directed dark horror comedy, written by Diablo Cody, navigates the horrors of female friendships in high school. Teens Jennifer Check and Anita “Needy” Lesnicki have had a tight-knit codependent bond since their days playing in the sandbox together. It’s a bond that even transcends Jennifer becoming possessed by a man-eating demon. High school is a transformative growing period, though, and some friendships aren’t meant to last through the growing pains. The complexities of female friendships get even more monstrous, literally, at the pivotal school dance.
Idle Hands
For most high school set horror, or horror comedies in this case, a school dance is an event filled with pressure for the hormonal teens in attendance. But even more important, it’s an event filled with a sea of unsuspecting victim potential for maximum catastrophe. So, no surprise that this riff off of the phrase, “idle hands are the Devil’s play-things,” that sees stoner teen Anton lose control of his possessed, murderous right hand would culminate in the big Halloween school dance. The dance becomes the battlefield between Anton and his evil hand as he fights to protect his neighbor turned dream girl Molly.
Detention
Co-written and directed by Joseph Kahn, this meta-slasher sci-fi hybrid riffs on teen archetypes at a warped speed. The truth is that the plot is very much a kitchen sink, but at its core it’s about a group of students that band together to solve a serial killing mystery while serving detention during prom. While most of the movie is a frenetic whirlwind of insanity and dissection of high school tropes, you can bet that these characters do eventually make their way to the prom, giving way to one of the quirkiest school dance scenes ever. Mmmbop was never as fun or as lively as it was in Detention.
Prom Night series
Beginning with 1980’s Canadian slasher starring Jamie Lee Curtis through 1992’s fourth entry in the series, Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil, this entire series is centered around the horrors of high school prom. The series begins as a serious slasher with an extended disco dance number at the prom and spins into more eccentric horror. The best, though, is Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, that opens with a 1957 flashback to prom and climaxes with a present day set prom. Evil Mary Lou will kill for that prom queen crown.
The Loved Ones
Subverting the big dance spectacles of typical high school horror, Sean Byrne’s debut examines what prom is like for those who don’t get prom dates. In this case, when socially awkward Lola gets rejected by Brent to attend the dance, she and her father decide to create their own dance at home. The only problem is Lola doesn’t take no for an answer and Brent becomes her unwilling date. Crowned queen of her own dance, she decides the best way to a man’s heart is to carve her way into it. Sometimes a more intimate setting makes for a much more terrifying feature, and Lola’s twisted prom can be the scariest of them all.
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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