Movies
Grace (limited)
“Without much of a plot driving the action, the film’s success depends solely on mood and tone, and GRACE, although diverting, isn’t quite haunting enough to make a lasting impact.”
When you get right down to it, infants are not for the squeamish. Following the harrowing ordeal of childbirth, the cutting of the umbilical cord, the expulsion of the placenta, and the wince-inducing episiotomy, you’ve still got to deal with breast pumps, nipple soreness, and the kid’s fontanel (always creepy); in short, childbirth is one subject that can be milked for easy shocks. Writer/director Paul Solet’s feature film debut, GRACE, is carried by a handful of potent scenes that cleverly mine our fears of early parenthood. Too bad the potency is diluted by sluggish pacing and a couple of baggy subplots.
Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd, CABIN FEVER) and her husband have been struggling to conceive for the past three years, resorting to fertility drugs and a fanatical adherence to holistics and health food. Finally pregnant, Madeline is determined to experience childbirth with a midwife, but her fiercely bitchy mother-in-law insists on using her own personal M.D., undermining Madeline’s personal birthing decisions every chance she gets. At 31 weeks along, a cruelly random car accident severely injures Madeline, leaving her baby stillborn inside of her. She makes the difficult decision to carry the dead baby to term, and although she gives birth to a lifeless infant in her midwife’s birthing pool, after a few moments the baby miraculously begins to breathe.
Madeline is enraptured with Grace, her miracle daughter, and although the hospital would like to investigate Grace’s resurrection with a series of blood tests, Madeline is reluctant. Alone at home with her infant, Madeline is disturbed when Grace begins to attract house flies, and, even worse, is disinterested in breast milk, only to be eagerly enraptured when Madeline’s torn nipple leaks blood into her newborn mouth. Yes, it seems that Grace craves blood. Madeline tries to satiate her with the excess gore squeezed from a package of supermarket steaks, but Grace continues to cry, unsatisfied. So Madeline must look elsewhere for blood…
Madeline’s cat is named “Jonesy”, a subtle reference to ALIEN, and like Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, Solet’s movie explores the intrinsic fears of motherhood. Expanded from his 2006 short film of the same name, GRACE works best during its tight mutant baby moments, when it most strongly resembles Larry Cohen’s IT’S ALIVE! During the introspective scenes reflecting on a lesbian relationship in Madeline’s past, or the segments featuring the grieving mother-in-law acting out her maternal fantasies, GRACE grows sluggish and tiresome, bearing the stretch marks of a short film idea that has been unnecessarily expanded to feature length. Although several moments in GRACE pack a visceral punch, those scenes are shot-gunned across a poorly-paced narrative, resulting in an acceptably entertaining, if sometimes uneven, horror movie experience.
At the Sundance screening I attended, the audience whooped, hollered, and screamed, and two men reportedly fainted during the show. It’s true that Solet takes the audience on a twisted ride down a very dark birth canal, but is it dark and twisted enough? Sundance audiences may scream and faint at the likes of GRACE, but the die-hard horror fan will be merely amused by Solet’s bloodthirsty baby shenanigans. Without much of a plot driving the action, the film’s success depends solely on mood and tone, and GRACE, although diverting, isn’t quite haunting enough to make a lasting impact. At 45 minutes, GRACE would be an impressively bizarre, tightly-wound stunner, but at a swollen 94 minutes, it sticks around for too long after its due date.
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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