Editorials
Dancing with the Devil – Ryan Coogler Gets Personal in ‘Sinners’ Making-of Featurette
“Sinners came from a very personal place, man.”
Ryan Coogler doesn’t hold back in Dancing with the Devil: The Making of Sinners, the 32-minute featurette that accompanies his latest film on digital and physical media.
The writer-director explains that spending time in Byron, Georgia after wrapping his previous effort, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, planted the seed for what would become Sinners.
“I saw a cotton plantation. I had never seen the plant before in person, and that experience made me think of my uncle, who was from Mississippi. He grew up in his early times as a sharecropper and eventually fled the state and came to California.”
Coogler continues, “We had a very close relationship. He passed away in 2015 as I was finishing up my second feature film, Creed. He never got to see that movie, and I never really properly mourned that loss.”
While considering ideas for his next film some time later, Howlin’ Wolf‘s “Wang Dang Doodle” came on, which reminded Coogler of listening to blues music with his uncle. “The movie just came to me,” he says. “It kind of all coalesced in that moment.”
He adds, “More than anything, I felt it was an opportunity for me to write a love letter to cinema, to all of the things that I love about going to the movies and watching movies with an audience; that feeling that drove me to want to become a filmmaker.”
“This story is closest to him because I think parts of Smoke, parts of Stack, parts of Sammie are him,” explains Zinzi Coogler, Ryan’s wife and producing partner. Always the first person to read his scripts, Zinzi immediately recognized how personal Sinners was for her husband.
“He just revels in the memories that he has with his big cousins. Those are the men who formulated his ideas about relationships, about taking care of family, and about responsibility, and about manhood in those formative years. Those are stories and memories he’s just latched onto.”
“Sinners came together astonishingly fast,” says producer Sev Ohanian, who’s relationship with Coogler dates back to co-producing his 2013 feature debut, Fruitvale Station. A mere two months after pitching the idea, Coogler had a complete script about twin brothers returning home to leave their troubled lives behind, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
Knowing he needed a team he could trust to pull off the ambitious project, Coogler enlisted many of his past collaborators. “I’m maximizing all the relationships that I’ve formed with all the folks that helped me make those movies, and I’m kind of just cashing it in on this picture,” he says.
He reunited with several of his key collaborators from Wakanda Forever, including director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw, production designer Hannah Beachler, costume designer Ruth E. Carter, editor Michael P. Shawver, and composer Ludwig Göransson.
“When I read it, I texted him and I was like, ‘This is amazing.’ I couldn’t put it down,” says Arkapaw. “But anytime I have the opportunity to work with him, I’m excited about it.”
“Getting a call like that is not only a gift,” adds Carter. “It’s more like a mission to tell this story and to bring people into awareness of people in the South who made something out of nothing, who were disenfranchised but created the blues, created beautiful music that has influenced generations and all kinds of genres.”
“This is a family project,” says Göransson. “We’re bringing in the best people in the world to collaborate and make this happen.”
When it came to the dual leading roles of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, Coogler had only one actor in mind: Michael B. Jordan, with whom he worked on all four of his prior films.
“It was a role that I thought only Michael could do,” says Coogler. “So when I brought it to him, it was an opportunity for us to kind of jump off this creative cliff together with no safety net.”
Jordan admits he was nervous when he first heard the pitch. “He picks up the phone and calls and thinks about you for a certain project that’s really, really personal to him, that means a lot to him, and he trusts you to deliver the message, to be a part of that process. You take it seriously, and it means a lot.”
“I think what makes Michael and Ryan’s collaboration so successful is trust, openness. It’s not being afraid to be honest with each other,” Shawver observes. “Through the years, obviously, that trust has grown, and I’ve never seen both of them so locked in.”
With Jordan on board, a global search was launched for an actor who could also pull off the musical demands required for the role of Sammie. Newcomer Miles Caton immediately captured Coogler’s attention with his voice. Caton taught himself how to play guitar for the part, studying blues legends like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Son House.
“If blues is the backbone for popular music globally, the scary story is the backbone for all storytelling,” says Coogler, who was interested in exploring the irony of an oppressed people maintaining their zest for life through music while also tackling the horror genre.
“My earliest memories of movies and the power of them are sitting in a room full of strangers dark and being absolutely terrified by something that’s happening on screen,” he notes. “All of my favorite filmmakers, they left a dent in that genre somehow. I couldn’t wait to do one one day.”
The New Orleans rain threw the shoot off schedule on more than one occasion, forcing the production to adapt, but the elaborate sets and costumes helped transport the cast and crew into the 1930s as soon as the cameras rolled.
It was Warner Bros. executive Jesse Ehrman who suggested filming in large format, which immediately clicked with Coogler’s vision for his larger-than-life characters.
“We’re gonna show a generation of Americans that are often overlooked, that people feel uncomfortable talking about, people don’t wanna spend time with, but to me, these people from this era are giants,” Coogler explains. “So I was like, ‘It has to be shot on the most epic format.'”
Working with an oversized IMAX camera presented challenges — like pulling off the intricately choreographed, generation-spanning musical number — but the benefits proved to far outweigh any complications.
“When that film camera is rolling, the IMAX camera is rolling, people are really on point,” explains IMAX camera technician Scott C. Smith. “They really try their hardest every take to get everything exactly right, because film is precious.”
“This is a full meal of a movie,” says Coogler. “It’s very balanced. It has all the elements that I love when I’m both watching a movie and when I’m making a movie.” That includes music, stunts, genre bending, and practical effects merged with visual effects.
He confesses, “In many ways, it’s the most important movie I’ve ever made, and it’s straight from me to audiences.”
Sinners is available now on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.