Editorials
‘The Adjuster’ Is a Psychosexual Baptism by Fire [Maple Syrup Massacre]
Maple Syrup Massacre is an editorial series where Joe Lipsett dissects the themes, conventions and contributions of new and classic Canadian horror films. Spoilers follow…
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster is a horror film.
Psychological thriller is more apt descriptor, though audiences seeking scary set pieces will walk away unsatisfied. Despite this, The Adjuster has a narrative of thriller tropes, including a large number of psychosexual relationships, characters adopting dual roles (or simply role playing) and an ending that encourages audiences to re-evaluate what they have seen.
Egoyan is one of Canada’s most significant contemporary directors, though internationally his work is known principally in art cinema and film festival circles. In the 90s, Egoyan was a symbol of national pride; he, along with David Cronenberg, was essentially the face of English-language Canadian film. His most famous film is the Sarah Polley-starring The Sweet Hereafter, which was nominated for two Oscars in 1998 (one for Best Director and one for Best Adapted Screenplay).
1991’s The Adjuster is his fourth film and the one that put him on the map as a significant talent to look out for.
Written and directed by Egoyan, the film stars Elias Koteas (Shutter Island) as Noah Render, an insurance adjuster who goes to great lengths for his job. He not only comforts the victims of house fires, he puts them all up in the same motel, and even sleeps with them (male and female).
Noah is married to Hera (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s real-life wife), an Armenian refugee who works as a film censor. Just as Noah has his own “private life,” so too does Hera: she covertly records the violent, sexual content of the films and screens them for her sister Seta (Rose Sarkisyan).
Then there’s rich married couple Bubba (Maury Chaykin, Of Unknown Origin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose, Grace), whose lives are seemingly dedicated to kinky role playing. They’re introduced on the subway, where Hera sees Mimi use Bubba, who is dressed as an unhoused, mentally-ill man, to finger herself in public. Later Mimi dresses as a cheerleader who is ravaged by football players while her cuck husband films the encounter.
Although the film has a unhurried, dream-like plot, the lives of these characters become intertwined when Bubba happens upon the Render house and asks to rent it for a week to film another salacious film with his wife. This displaces Noah, Hera, their young son and Seta, forcing them to move into the motel alongside all of his clients.
Written out in this form, The Adjuster reads like a cross between a porno and sex, lies and videotape, but like Egoyan’s other films, it is really about the secret lives of extremely damaged people. Tragedy looms large over nearly every character and while there is a certain amount of sex, the sexual interactions – much like the lies the characters tell – are a form of trauma-response. Characters struggle deeply to connect, often resorting to films or sex rather than words to negotiate their relationships with others.
These are common themes within Egoyan’s work: his films are filled with characters who adopt a false identity in order to seek out connections, all the while holding the truth (and therefore genuine relationships) at arm’s length. Canadian film scholar Tom McSorley even wrote an entire book on The Adjuster’s place within the history of Canadian film, as well as its use of “intimacy and detachment” to advance its thematic interests.
Tellingly, The Adjuster is set in an unnamed Canadian location. The world of the film is populated entirely by non-descript locations: the Render home is actually a model home in an empty tract of suburbia, abandoned when the developer went broke. The survivors of the fires that Noah works and sleeps with are all put up in a generic motel and Hera’s censor job takes place in an innocuous theater within a cavernous non-descript archive.
McSorley reads the lack of identifiers in the film as, in part, a reflection of the Canadian film funding model. At the time funding was available at both the provincial (Ontario Film Development Corporation) and federal (Canadian Film Development Corporation) level. Both agencies were incentivizing filmmakers to make work that was more commercial in order to sell films internationally, which was essentially code-speak for “remove the Canadian references” such as geographical and cultural specificity.
Situating the film in these liminal spaces reinforce its themes and character arcs, particularly the deconstruction of role-play and simulation. When The Adjuster ends with a startling reveal that recontextualizes who Noah is, it works because he and the other characters don’t seem to live in the real world. The result is a haunting meditation on the struggle to connect to others; characters are instead caught in a cyclical baptism of fire, role-play, mediated video, and shimmering memories of violence.
The Adjuster may not be a straightforward horror film, but it feels distinctly genre-adjacent in the way audiences describe A24 and NEON films. Fans who have exhausted the weird sex and chilly aesthetics of Cronenberg would do well to check out Egoyan for their next fix.
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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