Editorials
‘Dead Space’ Can Learn from ‘Alien: Isolation’
What Visceral Games accomplished with the Dead Space franchise is nothing short of spectacular. This series has left an indelible mark on the horror genre as well as gaming as a whole. The first introduced us to its sci-fi world, setting the foundation for a sequel that would go on to refine that winning formula to a near-perfect balance of action and horror. The third wasn’t as refreshing as its predecessors, but its optional co-op and weapon crafting were welcome additions to the series.
Horror games have a tendency to shy away from combat in favor of giving the player an empathetic, under-equipped, and sometimes even entirely helpless character, because popular games like Clock Tower, Fatal Frame and Silent Hill found success with that approach.
Dead Space didn’t shy away from combat. Instead, it gave it a name — strategic dismemberment — and built a satisfying horror game around it. The combat made sense. Isaac Clarke wasn’t a badass, at least not initially, but he was an engineer aboard a ship that was brimming with tools that were begging to be weaponized.
Similarly to Silent Hill, which has historically relied on a minimal approach to its UI so it never breaks the immersion, Dead Space introduced a fully diegetic interface that removed the clutter by moving all of the “gamey” aspects like Isaac’s health and inventory into the game world. It wasn’t the first game to do that, but I’d argue it was the first to do it well.
I’m touching on these things because this series’ has accomplished a lot, and its willingness to innovate is something that’s worth celebrating. Whether or not Alien: Isolation goes on to become the first in a new franchise of Alien games remains to be seen. It wasn’t perfect, but developer Creative Assembly showed that same willingness to push the envelope that Visceral did with Dead Space.
They’re similar games. Both follow a member of a rescue team that’s on a mission to find a missing loved one. When they arrive, things go wrong, stranding them in a place where something has gone horribly wrong. They’re separated from their team and forced to use their unique skillsets to scavenge resources from the surrounding area to build what they need to survive.
That’s just the first 20 minutes of each game, but you get the point.
One of the major differences between Alien: Isolation and Dead Space as it is today is while most of us have had years — or in the case of the former, decades — to get familiar with their monsters, every antagonist in Isolation is introduced to us in a way that makes them terrifying.
Necromorphs aren’t any less gross or unsettling to look at as they were in 2008, but they are substantially less intimidating. You can throw as many variations of the same monsters at us as you like, but we’re familiar with their bag of tricks. A fear of the unknown is what scares us, and there’s little we don’t know about Necromorphs at this point.
Unless EA’s been working on some sort of mass memory wiping device — and after disastrous launches of Sim City, Battlefield 4 and Dungeon Keeper, they may very well might — this familiarity cannot be erased.
For Necromorphs to be as intimidating as they were in the first Dead Space, they’ll need to be made new again. This means they’ll need to be presented differently, with new abilities. In past Alien games, the aliens were little more than cannon fodder. They were insects to be squashed, rather than intelligent killing machines.
Alien: Isolation remedied this by focusing on a single, exceptionally cunning xenomorph that was nothing like the things we killed by the hundreds in games like Alien: Colonial Marines and Alien vs. Predator.
Much like Necromorphs, the alien’s movements are unpredictable thanks to an impressive AI that made clever use of the Sevastopol’s liberal smattering of vents, which it could use to sneak up on an unsuspecting Ripley. Necromorphs are former humans who have been twisted into living weapons and controlled by an ancient hive mind, but there’s little to differentiate them from your average zombie in terms of behavior.
Solutions can be found outside the horror genre, too. After Halo 3, the Covenant were familiar and predictable. They spoke English and had funny voices. Then Halo: Reach came along and they looked differently and spoke in alien languages. Even the way they moved and reacted to the player were less predictable.
There comes a point in the timeline of many video game franchises when the story goes somewhere we’d rather not follow. We’ve seen it a handful of times with games like Condemned II: Bloodshot, Resident Evil 5 and Dino Crisis 3, and while there might not be a good example of a series that’s come back from this, I have a feeling Dead Space can.
The problem lies with the final act of Dead Space 3, which is, in a word, completely f**king bonkers.
I spent some time at Visceral working on the game every day for six months, and I still couldn’t explain what happened there. Something about Necro-Moons, a Unitologist prophecy and Convergence, an alien apocalypse, because video games.
Dead Space went full-on Resident Evil Its narrative scope got too big, and what we got an incoherent mess that didn’t fit with this series’ greatest strengths. It wasn’t a story about survival against a horrific alien menace; it was a tale of survival against multiple alien threats told on a galactic scale.
As a franchise, Aliens has an impressive fiction and scope that could be used for the foundation of hundreds of films and video games. Alien: Isolation could’ve been more narratively ambitious, but that would’ve made it less personal. When the player loses that personal connection to the character they control, they care less, making it less effective as a horror game.
Before it can scare us again, Dead Space will need to scale back. The countless hours I spent aboard the Sprawl and the USG Ishimura will stick with me considerably longer than Tau Volantis, despite my appreciation for the homage Dead Space 3 gave to The Thing.
For now, Dead Space is on hiatus. It hasn’t been canned, and EA has gone to great lengths to confirm that fact three separate times now. Isaac and Friends are taking a much-needed break, and the more time they spend finding themselves before making a triumphant return, the better.
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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