Editorials
‘Colossal’: The Kaiju Romance Dramedy That Never Quite Took Off
There is something that has always been alarming about arguably the most common counterpoint to the criticism of human characters being drastically underwritten in kaiju movies. Whenever a review or comment sheds light on this, the go-to defense is something along the lines of the movie(s) “not being about the humans.” Furthermore, tell me how many times you’ve heard the argument of kaiju movies “just being movies about monsters destroying stuff.”
On a certain level, it’s a simple defense that makes sense when looking at the state of monster movies, or more specifically kaiju movies. The draw when going to see any of these films does not necessarily fall to the plight of the human characters. A typical trailer for a kaiju movie is pinpointed on…well, the kaiju itself, and it clearly needs to be. How can you get people to the movie theater if they’re not promised insane kaiju carnage? What would a kaiju movie be if it focused on the humanity being affected by the monster’s path of destruction?
It would be the original Godzilla. The OG King Kong. Mothra. Shin Godzilla. Kong: Skull Island. Many more kaiju movies than you might realize.
Kaiju stories at their most effective when there are added stakes that extend beyond simple monster mayhem. The destruction can only be engaging for so long before the plight of the humans, us, takes centerstage. It is not impossible to write a story that focuses purely on the beasts without any human interaction, but the criticism that human characters shouldn’t matter in these stories would dismiss the very core of kaiju films: the humanity.
King Kong isn’t simply a giant gorilla, but one that has been angered on multiple occasions by nosy humans attempting to exploit the beast for their own gain. Godzilla is a metaphor for the fear of nuclear war and its catastrophic effects on post-Hiroshima Japan. Mothra is seen as a heroic kaiju who is extremely protective of the natives on her island. Humanity is a key component of kaiju stories, so it should absolutely be taken into consideration when watching them, even if you only desire to see monsters causing carnage or engaging in one-on-one battles with other monsters.
Perhaps this is the root behind the lackluster release of Nacho Vigalondo’s own take on a kaiju film, Colossal.
Starring Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis, Colossal was something of an adventurous project for the Oscar-winning actress, who was looking to develop a story that allowed her to liberate her artistic side at a time when she felt as though she was in “an artistic no man’s land.” It was here where she came across the script for Colossal and before you know it, this international creature feature was released by Neon in 2016 to positive reviews, yet less than $5 million worldwide.
If you ever saw the official trailer before its release, you would be forgiven for feeling duped out of what you expected. The trailer lays out the general idea of the story: Anne Hathaway plays a party girl who gets kicked out by her boyfriend and forced to move back to her hometown. In the middle of her trying to regain control of her life is a giant monster that starts manifesting out of thin air in Seoul and acting erratically. She soon discovers that the monster’s appearance is mysteriously caused by her as she now tries to navigate a potential global crisis.
Vigalondo’s kaiju dramedy promises a bizarre monster romp that sees Anne Hathaway prancing around on a playground while a kaiju terrorizes South Korea and in a sense, we get plenty of that here. What the trailer doesn’t show you is that it’s a kaiju battle movie…but the kaijus are just two humans with a bone to pick with each other. Jason Sudeikis’s character is revealed to have this effect as well, manifesting a giant robot in the same area in Seoul, though his intentions are far more sinister.
In short, it’s a kaiju movie about humans.
As mentioned before, humans tend to get a bad rap in kaiju movies as audiences come to see giant monsters lay waste to whatever obstacles that happen to be in their path. Godzilla 2014 still receives criticism for showcasing the humans far more than the radioactive beast, leading to Godzilla vs. Kong becoming the success story that it has turned into even in the middle of a global pandemic. We see plenty of the two titans laying the smackdown on each other, meaning that the draws of the film deliver what audiences desire.
So when a film like Colossal promises kaiju mayhem and the end result is two alcoholics pushing each other on a playground, it is safe to say that not everybody will come out feeling satisfied. Critical praise can only mean so much if audience approval matches the enthusiasm, but the film’s misleading premise coupled with an already limited release places Colossal in the vast sea of original ideas being rejected by audiences.
Colossal may not have entirely delivered on the carnage and epic battles, but what it instead brought to the spotlight was a bold and ambitious melding of genres to create a familiar story in new territory. Keeping with the tradition of the monster acting as an extended allegory for something in the real-world, the monsters in Vigalondo’s dramedy represent the festering anger residing within ourselves.
“There is a monster in all of us” serves as the perfect tagline for this film, pointing not just to the obvious connection of Anne Hathaway manifesting a giant monster in another part of the world, but our own lingering anger and how easy it can be to loosen inhibitions and let it take you over entirely. We all have the capacity to potentially do awful things, but our learned filters prevent many of us from going through with those thoughts. But the anger can seep out on its own without our conscious knowledge.
Gloria, Hathaway’s character, is on a path to self-destruction, partying her life away with no clear plans on what to do for the future. Though her intentions are not malicious, her actions nonetheless cause a ripple effect that extends to her own boyfriend growing resentful of her. Even when she figures out that the playground in her hometown is the connection between her and the Seoul monster, her first instinct is to joke around with her friends and laugh off an already serious situation.
Even if it was not her intention to do so, Gloria’s childish behavior results in the deaths of hundreds of South Koreans, hammering home the idea of her destructive behavior extending far beyond herself. However, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) differs from this in that his destructive behavior is not only completely intentional on his behalf, it becomes something he revels in it upon the realization that he can manifest a robot through the playground as well.
Oscar’s connection is more closely connected with the allegory of anger, with the man himself being a ball of hatred that is actively antagonistic towards the idea of progress or even happiness. A childhood friend of Gloria, Oscar is somebody who was never content on living a small-town and overly uneventful life while Gloria was able to move to New York. He takes out his frustrations on the friends around him, subtly at first with passive-aggressive remarks revealing his annoyance at their quirks, before Gloria’s return to their hometown and the playground cut him loose from his inhibitions.
The subsequent “battles” between the monster and the robot is a result of Gloria and Oscar’s destructive tendencies reaching a boiling point, but whereas Gloria realizes the error of her mistakes, Oscar gleefully pushes forward with the knowledge that his actions technically label him a dangerous international terrorist. The self-hatred is the heart of the kaiju battles in Colossal and it’s quite stunning that a seemingly silly sequence of Sudeikis bombastically stomping around on a children’s playground is the film’s furthest descent into depraved kaiju destruction.
But that is the strength of Colossal: finding an inventive way to present a common story with unpredictably high stakes. A woman coming to terms with her own destructive behavior and putting an end to somebody else’s similar path becomes a grand scale battle, essentially encouraging us to become invested in the plight of small-town folks confronting their personal demons. The best kaiju films have the most human elements to them and a woman powering through the control of her abusive ex-friend is about as human as a monster mash movie can be.
A kaiju film should not automatically be praised for having decent human characters among the rubble. These movies are only as fun and engaging as the humans that bear witness to these larger-than-life monsters roaming around. Colossal stands as an example of the kaiju genre cleverly exploring human concepts to a successful degree. The film may not have made enough money during its initial run, but its placement on Hulu is the next chance for audiences to branch out and discover something they may be able to connect with.
Even if you are somebody who doesn’t care for Colossal, merely recognizing the film’s artistic intentions can do well in helping similar projects get funded for the future. Maybe Vigalondo just isn’t your style, but that doesn’t mean that other filmmakers can’t take the kaiju genre and transform their story into another hybrid project that could have a better chance at breaking out. We are often told to vote with our wallets and if the success of Godzilla vs. Kong is any indication, we are more than ready to break voting turnout when need be. It’s those votes that can make or break the next great kaiju original.
Colossal may not have been that but five years later, its originality is still something to be admired.
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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