Editorials
19 Things We Learned from ‘The Burning’ Commentary
This month marks the 45th anniversary of 1981’s The Burning, a summer camp slasher made to cash in on the previous year’s success of Friday the 13th. The film was critically drubbed but generally well-received by horror fans, and it’s only grown in its reputation since.
The talent roster on the film is pretty remarkable for a slasher, and it’s the feature debut for actors like Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and Brian Backer. Tom Savini did the practical gore effects, and editor Jack Sholder would go on to direct his own genre bangers, including Alone in the Dark and The Hidden.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
The Burning (1981)
Commentators: Tony Maylam (director), Alan Jones (film journalist)
1. There aren’t a lot of American slashers directed by British filmmakers, and Maylam credits his own journey towards that dream to a sexual predator named Harvey Weinstein. The creep saw an early concert film that Maylam made about Genesis and asked if he’d like to make a movie for him. “He was manic,” says Maylam about the prick. (Okay, I got that out of my system.)
2. The initial story idea was called The Cropsey Maniac about a summer camp killer. It was very loosely inspired by an urban legend known around the New York area that’s explored further in 2009’s Cropsey. They don’t mention it here, but the film’s core premise regarding Cropsey and a summer camp was reportedly conceived before the release of Friday the 13th. Also, Madman was heading into production around the same time with a similar Cropsey premise and decided to change it up some to avoid feeling identical.
3. Weinstein’s mother and father were named Mira (Miriam) and Max, respectively. We’ll probably never know if that had any bearing on the name of the Weinsteins’ production company.
4. The early murder of the prostitute doesn’t seem to fit the narrative of Cropsey (Lou David) being fixated on killing folks at a summer camp, but Maylam recalls a certain producer not wanting to wait too long for a kill.
5. Tiger is played by Shelley Bruce, who was starring as Annie on Broadway at the time (possibly as an understudy?) but left the show to do this film. It’s her only feature film credit. She also apparently hung out with Maylam’s fourteen-year-old son and brought him to nightclubs during the film’s production.
6. Cropsey’s choice of garden shears as a weapon was Maylam’s idea.
7. Jones asks why Maylam never worked with the Weinsteins again, especially seeing as this was their first feature, and he helped put them on the road to success. The director says they’re all still friends (as of this recording back in 2007, just over a decade before Harvey Weinstein was arrested for numerous assaults), but the right project never really came along.
8. He says that while the story was conceived by Weinstein, it was Peter Lawrence who wrote the bulk of the actual script, with minor contributions from himself and Bob Weinstein. Maylam doesn’t know why Brad Grey is given a story credit on the film. “Brad was the manager of the camp’s superintendent and was basically a manager of comedians at the time,” and he worked very closely with Weinstein as the man’s gofer. He ultimately went on to become CEO of Paramount Pictures.
9. The story goes that Savini turned down working on Friday the 13th Part 2, “because he was so in love with this script,” but Maylam doesn’t quite confirm that. “We flew to Pittsburgh and went to his home. He liked the script very much, and he was on board, simple as that.”
10. Maylam suggests that the burn makeup effects in 1996’s Academy Award-winning The English Patient are pretty poor. He adds that looking back at The Burning, it would have been “much more sexy” if they had Cropsey’s burnt facial skin peeling off.
11. The original ending was meant to unfold in a big cave, but they discovered it was home to a high number of bats, so they squashed the idea. Cowards. They went with an old copper mine instead, and Maylam spent the next two months coughing up red dust.
12. The mask used to scare campers at the campfire was designed by Savini.
13. The “massacre on the raft” scene is the main one that caused the film issues with censors, particularly in the UK. Maylam considers it one of the best scenes in the film, and he giddily recalls handling the blood pump for the finger-cutting beat.
14. Maylam’s also standing in as the silhouetted Cropsey with the shears and is even the one holding the shears for 90 percent of the killer’s POV shots. He says it’s because he couldn’t get anyone in the crew to do it exactly right.
15. There are two times where the film fades to red, and Maylam thinks he maybe used the gag two times too many.
16. This is the slightly uncommon slasher that eschews the traditional “final girl” ending and has male characters defeat Cropsey instead. Jones references that as if to ask why they went that route, but Maylam says only that female characters give you “more vulnerability” before going silent for ten seconds.
17. He’s not aware of any thoughts on rebooting The Burning, but Maylam says there was brief interest in a possible sequel that ultimately went nowhere. He seems okay with that, in part because a sequel would have to go the supernatural route if they wanted to bring back Cropsey.
18. There’s a weird stinger at 1:21:45 where one of our final boys, Todd (Brian Matthews), sees a dead woman with a neck impalement. The camera seems to zoom in on a still photograph instead of being an actual filmed moment, and Maylam says the Weinsteins added it on their own in the editing room. “I don’t know why it was put in.”
19. There’s an end credit listing nine people as Special Business Advisors, and Maylam adds that they were all “Harvey’s friends.”
Quotes Without Context
“You bump into Bob or Harvey [Weinstein] in a hotel room, and we have a chat.”
“There’s nothing particularly innovative about this film at all.”
“Here’s Brad Grey’s plant again. I’ve never seen him since.”
“Look darling, we’ve all seen naked women for goodness sake, just get on with it.”
“The superhuman strength of these maniacs is always quite amazing.”
“You really hate this guy.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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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