Editorials
What Does ‘Doom’ Mean to You?
It’s weird that I’m writing this. I’m hardly qualified, and yet, I think this is a discussion worth having. I assume this conversation hasn’t been had because those who are more qualified to have it are busy stewing in their own eager anticipation for any clip, screen or detail that might give them an idea of what the Doom reboot we’ll be reacquainting ourselves with in the coming weeks will look like.
I’m afraid the anticipation for this game has reached a point where its long-awaited unveiling will only disappoint. Hype has taken down a lot of games, and while that’s definitely an obstacle the next Doom will need to overcome, it’s not the real problem.
The real issue is this series has an identity problem.
Before I can get into that, I’d like to share with you my own perception of what Doom is. Unfortunately, I can’t do that without talking about myself, but I promise to try my best to keep this from reading like a memoir.
Even before I joined Bloody Disgusting, I fancied myself a well-rounded enthusiast of the spooky scary genre. I had to up my game considerably when horror games became a pseudo-career, and in the six years since, I’ve made a concerted effort to try and play as many of them as I can. In my mission to be worthy of a genre I’ve loved my whole life, I tried everything from ambitious indies to often creatively limited AAA titles and even a bunch of more conceptual projects that likely would’ve required 6-12 more months of steady development before they would qualify as video games.
This would eventually lead me to the Doom franchise. The original served as my introduction to its hellishly bombastic world and a singular unnamed marine’s fight against the legions of hell.
It’d be a long time before I would get around to playing Doom 2 for the first time, and that was only because I thought doing so might help me develop a fuller understanding of the chunk of gaming history that I had missed out on. I’m not sure what it is about older video games that disagrees with my frail, sickly body, but 30 minutes with a 90’s era shooter tends to make me motion sick. Since the original two Doom games were more or less guaranteed to leave me feeling like I had just spent hours in a hot car on a bumpy road, I had to move on.
Doom 3 is the only game in the series that I’ve spent a significant amount of time with, and I didn’t actually beat it until a few years ago when I had to review the BFG Edition. The way I played horror games back then was dramatically different from how I experience them today, but the change wasn’t gradual, it was sudden.
That sudden change would happen just a year later, in 20015, with the arrival of Resident Evil 4. That game turned the horror genre upside-down, and at least a small part of the monumental impact it had also affected me.
Because 2004 me wasn’t burdened by what often feels like an endless piling on of responsibilities that starts almost immediately after high school, I was free to really take my time with it. This involved a number of habits that sound like gargantuan wastes of time now, such as investing way too much time into scouring text logs for codes that would grant me access to precious bounties that had been left unguarded inside storage lockers by the very people whose corpses now littered every other room.
Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t develop some form of mild OCD. If I thought there was even the smallest chance I could’ve overlooked something, I wouldn’t hesitate to go well out of my way to see if I indeed had. If left unchecked, the thought that “I might have missed something” would almost always congeal into “I definitely missed something” which I would then need to remedy with completely unnecessary backtracking.
In the decade and change that’s come and gone since, backtracking is now a dirty word to many gamers. It’s become synonymous with lazy game design, just as one might bring up BioShock in an argument for video games as art, or Gone Home as an example of what this medium is capable when it comes to telling meaningful stories, Doom 3 was often brought up for the simple fact that it was lousy with monster closets.
Too many monster closets and not enough flashlights is a shitty legacy, but I could’ve made it so much worse by including that deliciously cheesy film adaptation starring The Rock and that guy from The Lord of the Rings who always looks like he just woke up.
If you’re familiar with the series, you know how much it’s changed since the early 90’s. That’s sort of the core of what I’m trying to get at with this article, which I legitimately believed would be a super quick thing I could knock out in an hour. That was a half dozen paragraphs ago, and now when I close my eyes all I see is the big, blocky Doom logo pressed against the inside of my eyelids.
I’ve tried to explain, as coherently as I’m capable of at 3am, what this series means to me. Even after all that, I can honestly say that I have no idea what I my expectations are for the game Bethesda doesn’t want us to call Doom 4.
The point of this, all of this, is what is Doom to you? I have the sneaking suspicion that my idea of what this series is about, what it aspires to be and where I think it’s headed won’t match up with what someone who grew up playing the classic games in the mid-90’s, or someone who only recently made the plunge with the Doom 3 BFG Edition. More importantly, I have no real idea of what the team at id Software sees when they’re contemplating its future.
I’m sure the enigma that’s kept them busy for what feels like a lifetime will come out, eventually, and it’ll be adored by many. I can’t say whether or not it’ll be “scary”, but I also don’t know if that’s the point. It may even follow Wolfenstein: The New Order and favor bombastic action and violence over nightmarish visuals and constructing effective scares. It may find a balance between the two, if that falls on the path that was chosen for it.
I can name quite a few franchises that came out of the early to mid-90’s, but none of them were ever as amorphous as Doom is now. Resident Evil has endured enough reboots, remakes, remasters and various other course changes to be comparable, but it never lost its core identity even when it was clear Capcom had no idea what they were doing with it.
The timeline of the first three Doom games is an odd one. This series has gone dormant for over a decade twice. That means enough time has gone by between the the last two games and the one we have on the way that each generation will have formed a different idea of what it is, because chances are, you haven’t played classic Doom and modern Doom. There’s no “correct” perception of what Doom is, but there’s only one that matters and it’s not ours.
So tell me, what’s your Doom?
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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