Editorials
Cartoon Network’s “Over the Garden Wall” and Every Day as the Unknown
“Somewhere lost in the clouded annals of history lies a place that few have seen—a mysterious place called the Unknown, where long-forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood.”
What is the Unknown? The mysterious woodland world lost in time, blanketed in swathes of crackling, golden leaves, grey skies and a permeating, crisp chill, Over the Garden Wall’s foremost setting drapes itself in the comforts of the most sought-after autumn staples. The Unknown is where, five years ago this November, the two young leads of Cartoon Network’s 2014 Emmy-winning miniseries, half-brothers Wirt (voiced by Elijah Wood) and Greg (Collin Dean), found themselves far away from home. Misplaced in this endless, labyrinthine wilderness that seeks to hold them hostage there for good, the two brothers must journey out of the woods before an operatic creature known only as “the Beast” takes them prisoner and forces them to become one with the trees.
But along the way, we learn of our heroes’ far more grounded fears of the Unknown as they attempt to free themselves from this never-ending autumnal prison. The “Unknown” becomes a tangible place as well as an abstract concept, a reflection of Wirt and Greg’s own real-life anxieties with each absurd circumstance they find themselves in, as they become what they believe is closer to their escape. But delving deeper into the woods only heightens the tensions between them and pushes them farther off the beaten path, allowing them to become more susceptible to the Beast’s persuasions. The brothers’ earthly troubles bind them to an endless maze of cornfields and pumpkins of their own making.
Lauded by critics as a children’s show that all should watch, not just the demographic it’s aimed at, perhaps what ends up resonating even more than the series’ exquisite embrace of possibly the most adored time of the year is its lighthearted dabbling in the existential nightmare that is being alive. One could consider the Unknown symbolic of the specific, fraught relationship between Wirrt and Greg, but also partly representative of the overarching nature of life itself. Each episode sets itself up as another interpersonal struggle cloaked underneath both absurdity and humor and utter darkness; death and life, innocence intermingling with the uncanny. It allows the show to be both a sweet pill for its core audience to swallow as well as a genuinely fascinating piece of art, one that interrogates human existence underneath… jokes about frogs and a kid named Jason Funderburker?
Revealed in the second to last episode, titled “Into the Unknown,” Wirt and Greg (and Greg’s ever-name-changing frog) became lost in the Unknown after (needlessly) fleeing from police on Halloween night, tumbling down a hill, narrowly escaping being hit by a train. Sometime after that, they woke up and found themselves in a world similar to the one they knew, but turned inside out and pushed back about a hundred years or so. In this world, a disgruntled woodsman chops Edelwood trees for oil to keep the lantern lit where the soul of his daughter’s spirit resides. There is a town full of skeletons donning pumpkin costumes, and a tavern where patrons sing about their designated character tropes. There are good witches and bad witches, a school for animals to learn to read and write, and a ferry for frogs that wear clothes.
Each episode touches on Wirt and Greg’s brotherhood and real-world troubles amidst the absurdity of the episodes’ bizarre premises – Wirt’s identity issues and problems with love and self-loathing; his bitterness harbored towards his little brother Greg, the result of his mom’s marriage to a step-dad he partly resents; Greg’s relentless naivete, a source of clear frustration as he combats Wirt’s perceptions of him with goofy jokes, and is ultimately pushed to make a life-threatening decision for the both of them. It’s as if each segment of the series offers a glimpse into a host of worries both shared by and respective between the two brothers, not all of which are even fully articulated throughout the show’s ten-minute, ten-episode run (watched in one go, about the length of a normal feature film).
In “Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee,” Wirt, Greg, and their new talking bluebird friend, Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey), find themselves in a seemingly normal town inhabited by irritable citizens who dress up in harmless pumpkin garb. But the trio of youngsters ends up confronting death itself, as it’s revealed at the end of the episode that each pumpkin-clad person is really a skeleton in disguise, fancied up in celebration of the fall harvest. “Say aren’t you a little too… early?” a pumpkin maiden inquiries curiously to Wirt, upon their arrival, as he searches fruitlessly for a telephone to call home.
“What do you mean?” Wirt replies.
“I mean,” she continues, “it doesn’t seem like you’re ready to join us just yet.”
Then, “Schooltown Follies,” sees Wirt and Greg happen upon a school for little animals run by a woefully heartbroken schoolteacher on account of that no-good, two-timing, low down handsome man of hers, Jimmy Brown. Greg respectfully denies the concept of having to go to school at all, becoming the leader of a pack of homeless animals wearing street urchin clothes in place of academia. The very first episode, “The Old Grist Mill,” finds the two brothers meeting the Woodsman (Christopher Lloyd), and seems to uncover the pairs’ difficulties dealing with authority figures (furthered by Greg’s charming and bizarre encounters with Old Lady Daniels, which he describes to Wirt later on). Then there’s “Songs of the Dark Lantern,” which seems to more bluntly depict Wirt’s difficulties reckoning with his teenaged identity.
All episodes are run through with the main storyline of the Beast – a dark, perpetually silhouetted, opera-singing creature that hunts wayward souls in the Unknown to turn to Edelwood trees and fuel a cursed lantern. The Beast already has the Woodsman caught in his persuasive snare, tricking him into believing that his lost daughter is trapped in that lantern and must be kept alive – but really, the Woodsman is only keeping the Beast alive. The Beast trails Wirt and Greg ever from afar throughout Over the Garden Wall, and when it seems all hope is truly lost for the pair of them, the Beast finally sinks his teeth into vulnerable Greg so that Wirt may be allowed to escape in Greg’s stead.
Thus, if Wirt and Greg’s journey through the Unknown represents working through their unspoken, every-day adolescent woes, the Beast represents Wirt and Greg’s relationship as a whole –corrupted, all-encompassing but, ultimately, easily defeated and only existing because the two of them allow it to fester. Greg reveals his love for Wirt and Wirt, in turn, reveals his devotion to Greg, and the ease with which their tensions can be defeated, killing the Beast and setting another innocent soul free of his imprisonment in the process.
Absurdity is juxtaposed against reality, two opposing ideas running parallel to one another up until the very end, when it seems like they utterly fuse together. The Unknown suddenly blends into the real world, as it’s revealed that Wirt and Greg were left unconscious in the hospital, after their escapade out of the graveyard landed them into a cold lake as opposed to another world. There are loose ends that trickle in, like the name of an opulent tea magnate the brothers met in the Unknown carved upon the headstone of a real grave; or Greg’s frog still carrying in its belly a magical, glowing bell the brothers retrieved from a cursed young woman. You realize that the lives of Wirt and Greg and their relationships to others were only touched upon, and the show leaves you with more questions about them than answers. The narrator who carried us into the show in the first episode now closes us out with much less nuance: “And so the story is complete, and everyone is satisfied with the ending and so on and so forth,” as if he, the narrator, suddenly found better things to do than narrate the rest of his own story.
In the end, the real world is as absurd as a fantasy. The consequences of the Unknown, beyond a strengthening of Wirt and Greg’s brotherhood, are that whether or not the Unknown exists doesn’t matter. The hinted coexistence of our two worlds implies an acceptance of the unknowable; of the questions that will remain unanswered, of the imperceptible future that has yet to unfold, of the people whose inner lives we will never come even close to fully comprehending. Over the Garden Wall wants us to embrace these existential gaps and make peace with them – come to terms with our meaningless slice of existence as to better appreciate human connection and natural beauty. The world is a weird and terrifying place, but it can also be quite wonderful because of that. “Ain’t that just the way,” Greg ruminates lightheartedly. And sometimes, that’s all it really is.
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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