Movies
‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’ Opens with Intense, Failed Exorcism [Sneak Peek]
James Wan has passed the baton to Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) for The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, coming to theaters and HBO Max on June 4, 2021. The third entry in the popular franchise is being described as the darkest one yet and a departure from the previous two films. To get a feel for what’s in store, Bloody Disgusting got to check out the first eleven minutes of the movie and chat with Chaves about the footage. Between the intense opener, which feels more like a climactic scene, and the case that inspired the film, The Devil Made Me Do It looks to shake up the franchise’s conventional haunted house format.
Gone is the familiarity of the traditional openers established by The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2. Instead of opening sequence investigation cases removed from the central plot, which previously introduced Annabelle and teased the Amityville house, The Devil Made Me Do It picks up deep amid a possession case, with a trashed home and claw marks etched along the walls. Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), along with their assistant Drew (Shannon Kook), are deep in the throes of battling a powerful entity that’s inhabited young eight-year-old David Glatzel (The Haunting of Hill House’s Julian Hilliard). They’ve called in reinforcements from the church, but preventing the possessed child from causing harm until they arrive proves daunting.
This opening establishes a few key scares. David breaks free from his family and the Warrens, running upstairs to hide in the rural home. It shows the entity tormenting him, leading to a startling scare in the bathtub, followed by the child getting showered in blood. After David stabs his father in the leg, the Warrens realize they can’t wait and begin. The possessed throws every trick he can, including contorting his body in unnatural ways, while Lorraine gets slammed with horrifying visions. This extreme scene results in a failure; Arne Jackson (Ruairi O’Connor), fiancé to David’s sister, doesn’t heed Ed’s warnings. He invites the demon into himself.
Of this opening sequence, Chaves explains, “Everybody, starting with James Wan all the way down to the studio, wanted to kick the doors off the haunted house. We’ve seen the Warrens exorcise demons a couple of times; everyone expects that’s how we’re going to end the movie. What happens if you open a movie like that? When they fail?”
While the first eleven minutes packs in the atmosphere, scares, some character dynamics, and an inciting event that will have ripple effects throughout the film, it’s the body-bending of David that stands out. Chaves, doing as much on camera as possible, credits Hilliard’s body double for this unnerving moment.
“We had this amazing double, a contortionist named Emerald [Gordon]. She was twelve years old at the time of filming, and I think Julian was eight. All those contortionist scenes are all on camera. There are no speed effects either. What we had rehearsed is that she’d do it very slowly. We thought it’d be creepy to do this slow rise, but after we did it a couple of times, I asked if she could do anything else. She said she could do a really fast version. So, she did that, and you could hear everyone on set about to lose their lunch. She literally gets up that quickly. It’s all real-time. The visual effect is that we added Julian’s face onto her.”
In keeping with the theme of this sequel as taking an unexpected approach, Chaves warns not to hope for an introduction to a new spinoff entity. “When James first talked to me about this, the first thing I asked is what’s the new iconic monster. I was so excited; James is the master monster maker. From the very beginning, though, he said, ‘That’s what everyone’s expecting. We’re going to do something different.’”
Chaves also stresses that it’s not just the horror element that makes this entry the darkest yet, “I think there’s always going to be the marketing spin that this is the darkest Conjuring movie yet, but in a lot of ways, this really is the darkest Conjuring movie yet. There’s a real victim. There’s a real man who was killed, and we’re telling a story of the murderer. It’s Arne’s story. Debbie Glatzel, the sister of David, was there. She witnessed the murder, and she testified that she was possessed. She stood by him this entire time. They remained married up until just a week ago; she passed away from cancer. But they were married their entire lives. We interviewed them, and they stuck to their story. It was one of the darkest points in their life.”
In addition to the true-crime procedural aspect of the story, the director leaves us with a cryptic tease for what Ed and Lorraine Warren will face this outing, “I think this is a movie that’s intentionally a different Warren movie, and a different experience. We definitely have an adversary that we’ve never faced before. I think that in itself is going to be unique and surprising.”
(L-r) PATRICK WILSON, Director MICHAEL CHAVES and VERA FARMIGA and on the set of New Line Cinema’s horror film “THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Photo by Ben Rothstein
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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