Editorials
When Pests Attack! 8 Kills that Came From the Garden
Slugs (1988)
Arrow Video recently released Juan Piquer Simon ‘s Slugs on Blu-ray and the oozy 1988 shocker has never looked better. As a film that lives or dies by the quality of its visual creature and gore FX, it remains a top notch curio of the era and has stirred in me an interest in revisiting more in the garden variety, killer pests sub-genre.
From worms to bees, filmmakers have certainly loved playing on our fears of the dangerous creepy crawlers that live just outside our door.
These are only a few of my favorites.
Squirm (1976)
When millions of worms are driven from the earth and mutated by electricity, they begin to wreak havoc on the peaceful people of Fly Creek. Such is the premise for Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm, a notorious gross-out from the drive-in era. The film has remained extremely popular over the years, so much so that Scream Factory recently released a Collector’s Edition of the film which seems bananas.
Quick side note: Lieberman would go on to write and direct the LSD panic movie Blue Sunshine the following year, easily one of the most bizarre films of the era.
Mosquito (1995)
After Tremors, the 90’s got slammed with creature features hoping to cash in that film’s success. While some, like del Toro’s Mimic, took a serious approach, most aimed to replicate the fun, comedic flavour of Ron Underwood’s instant classic. Enter Mosquito, Gary Jone’s fun and gruesome bug movie whose influence can still be felt today with recent films like Infestation or Stung.
The craziest thing about Mosquito is that it’s a bit of a genre bender in that it’s alien blood that mutates the pests. last year, Synapse released the film as a 20th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray.
Ants! (1977)
From Them! to Empire of the Ants, Phase IV and many others, Hollywood has had an odd fascination with ants as predatory monsters. The most bizarre is probably the 1977 TV movie It Happened at Lakewood Manor (later re-titled Ants!) starring Suzanne Somers, Lynda Day George and Robert Foxworth. In the film, an army of poisonous ants traps a group of people in an old fashioned hotel.
The best news? The entire film is currently available for free on YouTube.
Bug (1975)
The craziest thing about Jeannot Szwarc’s Bug – and what helped it make this list over other mutant cockroach flicks – is that the cockroaches in the film have the ability to start fires. Fires! Hair goes up in smoke! Trucks explode! All from an invading army of roaches from the center of the earth.
Perhaps from the success of Bug, Swarc would famously go on to helm one of the most anticipated sequels at the time, Jaws 2. He is still a busy director of television, working regularly on shows like Supernatural.
The Swarm (1978)
There are a TON of killer bee movies and all of them are objectively bad. In fact a quick perusal of IMDB will reveal none of them, including this Irwin Allen production starring Michael Caine, breaks a 5/10 rating.
The Swarm is about a cloud of African killer bees that sweeps across America, laying waste to the land. Before Roland Emmerich picked up the honors, Irvin Allen was the king of disaster movies churning out classics like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure among others. Here he adapts from the book by Arthur Herzog III (real name) which was a hit at the time, capitalizing on the panic of the more aggressive”Africanized bees” which were being cross-bred and introduced into various regions around the world.
Ticks (1993)
Another slimy 90’s outing, Ticks comes from director Tony Randel who, only a few years earlier, had earned his stripes with the no holds barred Hellraiser 2.
Once again, Ticks follows on the heels of Tremors so it has a lighter tone, even though it is unrelentingly gruesome. One of the film’s claims to fame is it stars a decidedly young Seth Green.
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
Before Franck Marshall’s Arachnophobia became the go-to spider shocker, Kingdom of the Spiders had the honor of being considered the best. Yes, it’s a B-movie, but it’s actually pretty great (especially if you’re scared of spiders).
In the film is about a veterinarian, played by William Shatner, who is sent to investigate a rash of farm animal deaths in a rural community. It soon becomes apparent that millions of tarantulas are swarming the desert town and humans are their next target. Like many of the 70s nature shock films, Kingdom of the Spiders was influenced by the success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and reflected the concerns regarding the destruction of the environment at the time.
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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