Editorials
This is Not a Dream: Looking Back at John Carpenter’s Scariest Scene
Horror legend John Carpenter turns 78 this Friday, and Halloween Night: John Carpenter Live from Los Angeles is now streaming on Screambox. Bloody Disgusting is celebrating with John Carpenter Week. Today, Matthew Jackson examines the scariest scene in Carpenter’s filmography.
It takes nearly an hour for the scariest scene in John Carpenter‘s filmography to emerge from its home film, Prince of Darkness, and when it finally does arrive, it feels at first like it doesn’t fit at all.
Prince of Darkness, the middle entry in what Carpenter has loosely termed his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” emerges from a satisfyingly pulpy, old-school weird fiction premise. In the very simplest terms, it’s a movie about Satan in a jar buried beneath a random church in Los Angeles, a fun idea that allows Carpenter to play with religious horror, possession, and even science fiction. By the time the scariest scene emerges, it already feels like a complete story barreling toward a confrontation with unimaginable evil.
Then this happens:
If it’s your first time with Prince of Darkness, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you missed something, or something went wrong with your player. It feels like you’ve clipped out of one film and into something else, something that feels more like a vestigial piece of VHS tape than a scene in a movie. It arrives completely with fanfare, without windup, and disappears just as quickly as Walter (Dennis Dun) wakes up with a jolt on his cot. It’s so quick, and so strange, that you almost don’t notice that it’s footage of the very church where Carpenter’s band of scientists is holed up, searching for answers to contain evil incarnate.
Then it happens again. And again. Finally, the Priest (Donald Pleasence) presiding over the whole operation explains that the monks who called this church home, the Brotherhood of Sleep, have shared this dream for years. Anyone who falls asleep inside the church and its adjoining monastery experiences it, but no one knows exactly what it means.
So, what makes this so frightening? We begin with the simple truth of all nightmares: You are not in control. The team deduces that, as the voice in the message suggests, it’s not a dream but a transmission from the future using tachyons, upping the sci-fi factor in the film, but that doesn’t change the mechanics. Just as Wes Craven invented a demon who traffics in the murder of sleeping youths, Carpenter has invented an apocalyptic prophecy that beams into your head whether you like it or not. We all must sleep, and these people must stay in this monastery, and so they must confront the message, over and over again, no matter how confounding and eerie it feels.
No matter how many times you see it, the scene is irrepressibly, confoundingly eerie in a way that nothing else in Carpenter’s entire body of work can mimic. Carpenter’s beloved anamorphic widescreen lens is gone, replaced by grainy images that look more like something from a camcorder. The images are recognizably the same church, with the same iron fence, the same sign, the same statuary. But it’s not a carefully composed image, or at least it doesn’t appear to be.
Carpenter’s camera slinks low as the voice attempts to transmit a message, a voice that croaks with static like the robotic updates that come through an old weather radio. It feels, as the camera shakily creeps along the fence, that we’re meant to be hiding from something. It mimics that particular nightmare scenario in which we know that we’re meant to be afraid of something, but we can’t quite see it. We long to see it, long to understand it, and thus loosen fear’s grip, but it’s just out of reach. Which brings us to the finale of the sequence, each time it appears: A figure draped in a ragged cloth, silhouetted in pale light, ready to emerge from the church doorway. It’s an image you will never, ever forget, particularly as its meaning drills down into you throughout the rest of the film.
Prince of Darkness largely unfolds within the confines of the church, but every peek at the wider world suggests a change initiated by the strange container in the monastery basement, the ancient prison filled with Satan’s energy. The Priest talks about the sun changing, the air growing colder, and outside in the alleys and the parking lots, a host of drones in service to this dark energy have gathered. Unhoused people, stray passers-by, even reanimated corpses packed with insects lurk, waiting as the container leaks, spreads its malefic force. The context for the jarring dream/message grows clearer: Whatever is emerging from that church is the end of all hope for humanity, unless these scientists can stop it.
Knowing this, understanding that every time you close your eyes, this vision of emerging evil will haunt you, is frightening enough, but as the film nears its conclusion, Carpenter adds an element of more emotional, less existential investment. Throughout the film, fellow scientists Brian (Jameson Parker) and Catherine (Lisa Blount) have fallen for each other, sleeping together before their scientific mission begins, and then putting off what’s clearly a real emotional connection until the stakes are so impossibly high they simply have to admit how they feel, so they don’t have to die with it unsaid. The team doesn’t successfully contain the evil in the cylinder, but when Catherine sacrifices herself to push it and the “Anti-God” it seeks to summon into the dark dimension from whence they came, Brian is left deeply scarred by the experience. The world might be saved, but his future will forever be one different from what he’d hoped.
The film seems to head toward its ending without ever addressing the mysterious dream messages again. We never learn exactly who sent them, or exactly how, or what’s happening to lead to this moment when the evil force emerges from the church. All we know is what it implies, so when Brian dreams, from his own bed back at home, of Catherine emerging from that pale doorway in some future transmission, he wakes in a cold sweat. The implication is clear, and it’s one of the darkest in Carpenter’s filmography: Evil does not disappear. It cannot be banished, cannot be truly wiped away. It can only change forms, bide its time, tempt us with visions of what we truly want. The dreamy visions of evil triumphant have broken containment. They no longer belong solely to the Brotherhood of Sleep. For all we know, they could be everywhere.
It’s not as flashy as The Thing or as iconic as Halloween, but Prince of Darkness‘s daring dream transmissions are as indelible and potent as anything else in his filmography. They emerge as something seemingly incongruous, and though they quickly become part of the larger narrative, they still stand out as works of art unto themselves. These dark, grainy prophetic snippets of footage are the closest Carpenter ever got to the inexplicable yet inescapable logic of true nightmares, and they deserve to be remembered that way.
Follow along all week long as we salute John Carpenter.
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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