Editorials
In Defense of ‘DOOM’ (2005)
I’m about to try really hard to convince you that there is actual value to the universally panned Doom movie you probably only remember for those five minutes of first person carnage in the final act that are still objectively awesome to this day. There’s substance here that’s gone overlooked for too long, so I’m going to do exactly what Dwayne Johnson told me to do when he visited me last night in a dream I had after watching too much “Ballers”.
I’m going to open your eyes to just how entertaining this movie really is.
When I’m through, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t showered with awards. Forget them, we can remedy that right now. As Bloody Disgusting’s games editor — or the guy you non-gaming types might refer to as the guy who should really stick to writing about games because his taste in movies sucks — I’m awarding Doom our first ever BFG Award for Being Fucking Great.
All right, let’s do this.
For those keeping count, this is the third video game adaptation I’ve defended in our In Defense of… series. Each time I’ve assumed there’s nothing but hate for these films I like, but a majority of you seemed to enjoy Resident Evil and Silent Hill, so it’ll be interesting to see what reactions I get with this one.
Not enough people appreciate this quirky amalgam of 90’s space marine goodness and delicious B-movie cheese, or the filmmakers’ comical attempts to get us to take what’s going on on-screen seriously enough for it to be frightening. Much like watching a Michael Bay production, the secret to enjoying this movie is that you can never think about what’s going on.
Doom makes no effort to explain really anything. Its shameless abuse of scientific and military jargon gets delivered by dead-eyed actors who very clearly already received their paycheck. It wants you to leave your brain outside the Hellgate so it won’t get embarrassed when you spend more time thinking about what’s happening than the screenwriter did when they wrote it, possibly after being inspired by a SyFy movie marathon.
If any of that sounds like criticism, you haven’t been paying attention.
This is a movie that’s based on a game made in 1993, before developers discovered they could put stories in their games. Doom has had a monumental impact on video games, and specifically the genre of first person shooters. This series did for the FPS genre what Resident Evil did for survival horror or what Call of Duty did for the universally hated concept of annual releases, and it accomplished that while relying exclusively on its gameplay mechanics.
Doom, as a franchise, has never been known for its thoughtful characters or for particularly rich storytelling. It might’ve been capable of that, had id Software not prioritized making an addictive and rewarding gameplay experience over everything else. That’s partly why the original game has retained much of its charm to this day, because it’s still fun to play two decades (and change) after its release.
This is why I don’t understand some of the complaints about the movie. This movie is Doom, plain and simple. It’s unapologetic in its stubborn adherence to video game staples. It even goes so far as to end with a boss fight.
Doom is the video game equivalent of a run-on sentence where the words have been replaced with a labyrinthine network of rooms filled with demons and everything you could ever want to use against them. It’s a seemingly endless barrage of action with very little filler, because there’s no time for crap like character development when the legions of Hell are pouring into our world so they can cut down our brightest minds only to reanimate them as mindless ghouls.
Demons are assholes, and Doom treats them as such by turning their surprisingly tender monster bodies into a receptacle for lead, or whatever ammunition is made out of in 2046.
That essence is front and center here. It’s obvious the filmmakers wanted to make something that more closely resembled the games, but that would’ve required the sacrificing of roughly 90% of the dialogue to make room for soldier stuff, and Dwayne Johnson might not have been able to memorize all those complicated hand gestures military types use to issue orders.
Getting rid of the script would’ve been a tough sell anyway, and non-gamers wouldn’t know enough to appreciate how much closer that would’ve brought the film to the games. See, the games are like the stream of consciousness of a 12 year-old who’s just powered through The Avengers and all the candy that’s ever been or ever will be. They’re loud and obnoxious, but undeniably entertaining.
This movie tried to appeal to non-gamers and in doing so, it had to find a way to form a recognizable movie structure around a premise that might literally be impossible to take seriously. It tries to get us to care about the fates of its cast of unlikable characters, the majority of whom are introduced just so they can be torn apart later on by whatever the fuck this thing is supposed to be.
A team of professionally trained artists were told to design a frightening demon face, and that is what they came up with. That creature looks like something you might expect to find growing inside a haunted Easy-Bake Oven.
There’s no excuse for dull monster designs, so I won’t even bother.
That’s the one thing that really can’t be forgiven here. The characters are awful so as to maximize the feeling of satisfaction you’ll get when it’s their turn to die horribly. The dialogue is paced so it ties the scenes together and carries us quickly between them, unburdened by filler. This movie is an accurate depiction of the games, even if we’d rather not admit it.
And then there’s the glorious scene I mentioned earlier.
That scene is silly, gory, bombastic and very, very fun. It’s our reward for enduring the crap they had to cram in there in order to call it a movie. This is one of the most accurate live-action adaptations of a game ever, and aside from Silent Hill, it’s the closest Hollywood has ever come to bringing the magic of the games to the big screen, and I love it.
What do you think of the Doom movie?
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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