It looks like Hollywood’s latest horror gold rush is moving from Reddit and creepypasta forums to YouTube. After the success of online horror properties leaping to the big screen, Scott Stuber’s United Artists, Amazon MGM Studios, and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment have won the rights to “The Mandela Catalogue,” the viral analog horror series created by Alex Kister.
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According to Deadline, the project landed after a competitive 11-studio bidding war, with Kister now set to direct the feature himself. He will direct a film he adapted from a screenplay he wrote with Tyler Clifton.
That alone makes this one a fascinating development. Studios have been chasing internet-native horror for years, but “The Mandela Catalogue” is one of the more purely online phenomena to get this kind of heavyweight backing. Created by Kister in 2021, the YouTube series is considered one of the defining titles of the analog horror movement, alongside “The Backrooms” and “Local 58,” and has reportedly amassed more than 100 million views across its official episodes.
Set in the fictional Mandela County, Wisconsin, the series centers on a world invaded by shape-shifting, nearly immortal entities known as Alternates. These figures psychologically torture their victims, manipulate media, and take on the appearance of other people, giving the series its eerie found-footage, corrupted-broadcast, VHS-nightmare quality.
Spielberg and Holly Bario will produce for Amblin Entertainment, with Aaron B. Koontz producing for Paper Street Pictures, Stuber and Nick Nesbitt producing for United Artists, and Kister and Clifton also producing. Annie McCreery will oversee United Artists, while Maria Fortese will oversee Amblin.
The move also continues Amazon MGM and United Artists’ increasingly aggressive push into filmmaker- and IP-driven genre material. Stuber, who previously ran Netflix’s film division before joining Amazon MGM to relaunch United Artists, has been building out a slate with recognizable creative names and strong genre hooks. “The Mandela Catalogue” checks both boxes: a huge built-in online audience and a creator who will be shepherding his own work into feature form.
It also arrives at a moment when studios are paying much closer attention to horror born outside traditional pipelines. “The Backrooms,” from YouTube creator Kane Parsons, helped underline the potential of analog horror as a feature-film engine, and the recent movement around “Siren Head” suggests that viral horror characters and online mythologies are no longer being treated as niche curiosities. They are being treated like the next wave of franchise material.
Of course, adapting something like “The Mandela Catalogue” is not as straightforward as buying a comic book or a bestselling novel. Its appeal is tied heavily to format: glitchy transmissions, distorted religious imagery, low-fi dread, unexplained lore, and the uncanny feeling that the viewer has stumbled onto something they were not supposed to see. The feature version will have to find a way to preserve that texture while giving movie audiences something more expansive than a series of haunted transmissions.
No cast, production start date, or release date has been announced yet, but with viral horror taking off and an 11-studio bidding war behind it, expect all parties involved to move sooner rather than later. [Deadline]
