Editorials
Who’s Afraid of Candyman? What the Boogeyman’s Presence Says About Representation in Horror
As kids, there were a couple of things we didn’t do. We never talked back to parents (Lord help you if you did), never walked into a room of adults without speaking to every single one of them, and we didn’t even think of leaving the dinner table without eating every ounce of food in front of us. The more I think about it, there were many things we knew not to do as kids. But at the very top of this list was never, ever uttering his name. We never said that name in broad daylight, at night, in a group of friends, or in private. Saying it in a mirror was asking for a death sentence, so anyone who spoke the first syllable was asking for an ex-communication that would make John Wick envious.
Candyman scared us in a way no other boogeyman did. Freddy Krueger was hilarious, Jason Voorhees was deadly but dumb, and Michael Myers seemingly only cared about his relatives or those close to them. Candyman felt real. Sure, this guy with a hook for a hand who summoned bees at the drop of a dime might sound silly, but he inspired an innate sense of dread and fear in my friends that no other ghoul or terror ever did. About 20 years after the first film’s release, I figured out why Tony Todd’s horror icon stuck such a nerve: Candyman, both the character and the film, acknowledged Black people in a way other horror franchises didn’t, and some still don’t.
For Candyman, representation went beyond its title character. Black people existed in the world of Candyman as three-dimensional characters as opposed to knife or machete fodder. By creating a world that felt real for Black horror fans with characters they related to, Bernard Rose’s landmark flick made the horror that much scarier for audiences resigned to spectating on the sidelines.
Horror doesn’t work if the audience can’t relate. A Nightmare on Elm Street works because sleeping and dreaming are universal for those of us who aren’t narcoleptics. Any franchise not about Freddy Krueger creates familiarity through cast, settings, and the usual things we think about when watching a movie. Unfortunately, especially throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Black people were few and far between. Every now and then, we got a Kinkaid in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 or, my personal favorite, Joel in Scream 2, but the pickings were slim. As a result, the fear never wholly landed with the kids I knew because those movies weren’t about us. Even Freddy, once the scourge of the playground, turned into a laughingstock the older we got because he never seemed interested in anyone with melanin.
There is tons of digital ink spilled over the past several years about the importance of seeing yourself in the media you consume. That rings just as true in horror. Adequate representation means you’re a whole person with hopes and dreams instead of a token background character destined for body count status. Not for nothing, but when the prevailing thought in a community is that anyone who looks like them will die first with little to no character development, it’s harder to make them fans of the genre.
That’s why Candyman was, and remains, a revelation for an entire community. Even if we didn’t grow up in Cabrini Green or a place that looked like Cabrini Green, we recognized its inhabitants. Candyman has race at its core, but it doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the majority Black cast. Candyman succeeds because it treats its setting and its characters as standard rather than “other.” Just like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and any other franchise before it, Candyman focuses on relatable people and drops us into their day-to-day. Despite its narrative weirdness, that meant the boogeyman’s victims were also Black and brown. But the film spends enough time with them for their deaths to matter. What mattered the most to the kids I knew then and the adults I know today was seeing legitimate fear on the faces of people who looked like us.
Who is scared, and why, matters just as much as who is doing the scaring. As one of the few Black horror icons, Candyman shook us like no one before and no one since. In an era where slashers were jokes, Candyman was dead serious. Even his oh so tragic backstory steeped in racism didn’t make him less threatening to people who empathized. Keeping it all the way real, Tony Todd has a lot to do with that. His voice and menacing presence lent Candyman a gravity his counterparts lacked. But his mere existence resonated with an underserved audience looking for anything to latch onto. Todd played the character with elegance and romance, two words typically not associated with horror villains, much less Black ones. He seduced us the same way he did his victims. And all because they dared to say his name.
As kids, we talked about ways to defeat movie monsters. Silly, but hey, kids get to be that way. While we ran through a list of names that all seemed beatable, the world stopped when Candyman’s name came up. For us, there was no way to defeat him because that was the one movie where we were more than mere observers in someone else’s narrative. Candyman acknowledged our existence either as victims or bystanders. As kids in 1992 or as adults in 2021, that’s thrilling and terrifying all at once.
When no one else saw us, the man with the hook and the bees in his mouth did. That’s why when it comes to things not to do as an adult, like getting behind on bills or lying to your significant other, saying his name is still at the tippy top of the list. And that’s saying something.
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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