Film Theory: Do Not Believe His Lies (The Mandela Catalogue)

[Music] hello internet welcome to film theory the show that's contractually obligated to never sleep again thankfully i know just the thing to help with that the mandela catalog a terrifying series of six videos here on youtube that are guaranteed to give you nightmare fuel for weeks produced by alex kister the mandela catalog is the latest and greatest example from the increasingly popular world of analog horror think local 58 gemini home entertainment the walton files apparently there was just something about the 1980s that was utterly terrifying oh no those shoulder pads there they're so big is that thing a cell phone or a brick kill it kill it with fire ex-president ronald reagan no no get back get back i can't handle your trickle-down economics anyway all joking aside the mandela catalog tells its terrifying tale through a series of 1980s and 90s era vhs tapes all originating in the mysterious mandela county where children have started to go missing and a mysterious intruder is breaking into local homes but what begins as a few simple home videos quickly descends into a tale of kidnapping body swapping religious conspiracy and metaphysics this one is gonna get dark friends so buckle up while we try to crack open the unholy horrors that exist inside the mandela catalog it's hard to say exactly where we should start this series considering the first posted video isn't the one that the creator suggests watching first but this upload overthrown does set up our key theme so i think starting here still makes the most sense in it we're presented with an animated version of the birth of jesus coming specifically from a video series called the beginner's bible and yeah it gives you the classic tale of an angel gabriel descending from heaven to tell mary that she'll be giving birth to the savior jesus christ who'll bless us with love and joy and amazing black friday deals for everyone on our christmas list ah it is so nice to remember the reason for the season except this time the nativity story is just a little bit different our angel's name is redacted and his face has been censored for a brief moment though we glimpse behind the sensor bar to see this what looks to be a blue alien rips straight out of james cameron's avatar as he speaks he glitches on the word angel i am the angel gabriel already you can tell that something is going wrong here a suspicion that only grows once gabriel starts speaking in binary [Music] apparently the angels we have heard on high are very proficient with their ones and zeros turning on closed captions we see that whispers translate to a code that reads i am the one true savior i must reverse the delusion joseph is next and indeed joseph stepfather of jesus is next as he sleeps the angel speaks to fear him this is like the worst asmr video lastly we see the shepherds in the field meeting our angel who once again declares himself to be the one true savior smash cut to black before we get red text saying i deceived them such weak minds yep we're in that part of youtube again friends sweet dreams everyone alright but let's get a grip on everything that we're seeing here first whatever this thing is it ain't an angel notice that only after it says i know everything about what makes you human does it reveal a human face this thing is a shape shifter and its true form is what we saw at the beginning before the sensor bar went up that weird blue alien face notice too that it stumbles over the word angel getting stuck on the letter a almost as though it was trying to say i am the alien and then correcting itself to me this whole thing is very reminiscent of the ancient aliens theory the idea that some intelligent extraterrestrials visited earth in the prehistoric days and in the process spawned all human conceptions of gods and religions as humans were unable to comprehend what they had just witnessed but let me be perfectly clear here i'm not married to that theory there's also plenty of evidence to suggest that this angel is in fact the devil himself satan again with closed captions turned on we get a special secret while the screen's black hidden in the closed captions is this message quote how frozen i became and powerless then ask it not reader for i write it not because all language would be insufficient i did not die and i alive remained not think for thyself now hast thou ought of wit this quote well poetic is actually a direct excerpt from a classic work of literature called dante's inferno specifically a part near the end of kanto 34. for those who don't know dante's inferno is basically just a dude's trip through the various circles of h-e-double toothpicks and this quote is coming from the end of his tour when dante's in the frozen center of it all and there he encounters satan himself chewing on some sinners in fact this line is his reaction to seeing the giant behemoth that is satan and he's not just chewing on any sinners he's chewing on some liars and frauds judas who lied to and betrayed jesus as well as brutus and cassius the two men who betrayed and murdered julius caesar so we see that fraud is the biggest sin as defined by the inferno the same type of fraud that we see our angel committing to marry joseph and the shepherds in the mandela catalog could our angel then potentially be satan himself it seems likely in the final upload of season one titled exhibition we get another hidden quote in the closed captions this time a bible verse corinthians 11 14. isn't it obvious that it's disgraceful for a man to have long hair oh wait sorry sorry wrong corinthians that's one corinthians not two corinthians sorry but cheese bible really pushing everyone to get their sick fate on huh anyway after a long section talking about whether girls can pray with their heads uncovered or whether they just need to shave off their hair here's the right quote for you and no wonder for satan disguises himself as an angel of light i mean that right there seems pretty explicit and just to hammer the point home in another video warning about how people in this universe are losing their minds to a disorder called mad we're told to quote avoid religious practices which again seems like this is a world where satan or that blue avatar alien take your pick has misled the masses and has seized control of the world's religions manipulating their minds and causing them to go crazy so it would seem that satan has come to deceive the world but why is he waiting all the way until the 80s to do anything with that and what exactly is his plan well either satan's a big fan of bon jovi or it has something to do with the analog part of analog horror the television you see the 80s was perhaps the golden age television it was when cable became popular suddenly instead of three channels you had dozens it was when the video cassette recorder allowed viewers to tape their favorite shows it was when the tv remote allowed people to veg out on the couch and just surf in short the tv rose to prominence during this decade and with it the ability to reach the masses almost anytime anywhere something that a fake brainwashing angel would probably love to exploit in the final upload of season 1 we see that the government has issued something called the television and mirror destruction order saying that if a loved one is coming to contact with one of these items you have to contact the local authorities right away in other words tvs are dangerous in this universe and also mirrors so let's reflect on that one thing that keeps getting brought up in the mandela catalog is fear gabriel talks about how he desires to know the fear of joseph and the shepherds in another video a training tape for emergency responders they're expressly told to not talk to victims on the phone because you might accidentally reveal your fear there's something absolutely chilling when you see an emergency services training video telling the only people who can help in a dire situation to cower in fear and let the innocents die and in yet another video we see an emergency alert about an onslaught of missing children that warns parents to keep their kids away from televisions because they might project frightening imagery it would seem then that some entity satan or whoever is using the tvs to broadcast fears into people's minds and into their homes this again seems to coincide with the 1980s setting for this thing and specifically the birth of the 24-hour news cycle in 1980 the cable channel cnn launched and in the process pioneered news as round-the-clock programming suddenly it wasn't just a short one hour update at the end of each night it was instead like sports live and updating with all the latest and all the worst headlines that humanity had to offer at any hour of any day a trend that is only accelerated with the internet and things like twitter now obviously i'm just making an analogy here a comparison to what's going on in the series but it does seem like something that's happening here in the mandela catalog in the season one finale we get a series of home videos by a young man named mark heathcliff he's important for a lot of other reasons that we'll talk about later throughout his tapes though nothing much happens some church imagery a door mysteriously opening and closing in the dark but then we see this a figure approaching him through a tv at night we get this assessment from the cops that are looking at the footage quote heathcliff has been paranoid for a prolonged period to me it seems to suggest that the tv was the thing that was causing his paranoia whether literally summing a shadow monster to taunt him or else symbolically causing him to succumb to his darkest fears in fact the tv does appear to offer a physical portal in people's homes upload number four intruder alert shows us this man who is more than happy to whisper to us well uh that's a comforting thought can you feed the cat while you're in there also notice the whispered voice sounds a lot like our angel friend anyway throughout this video we see him repeatedly appearing in televisions which would be scary on its own and it is but he also appears to be stealing children out of their beds midway through the video we get a psa about the importance of taking care of your children the psa presents us with a crying baby who when checked on by his mommy has vanished out of its crib the only person that was in the room the tv intruder and we know that he can get into and out of the house presumably through the tv as we see later in the same video our intruder roaming the house of the vanished child hidden in the shadows we're told that 3426 children have gone missing over the past several weeks so it looks like our dude here has been pretty darn busy why what's he doing with all these children and how is he doing it is it just sci-fi can he just teleport between tv screens well yeah it kind of seems like that the video tells us that quote they exist on different spectrums suggesting that this person this intruder may have the ability to appear and disappear from different spectra perhaps one that allows him to physically be broadcast into a home or at the very least exist on a different plane of reality and appear and disappear at will as we see in the short mad disorder video an entity is invisible it fades in to tell its victim something and then it fades away as if it were phasing in and out of reality and if this intruder is in some way related to the satan angel or is himself satan then the ability to do that to appear and disappear at will isn't all that far-fetched which brings us to what's actually getting whispered here in the mad disorder video we're told that whatever's being said it drives the victim insane causing them to in 97 of cases end their own life but what information is actually being spread here what is prompting all this fear well the title of the video in this case might be our biggest clue mad in the context of the mandela catalog is short for something called metaphysical awareness disorder though we're never told what this thing is only the deadly end results of what coming down with it entails based on the words alone i think we can get a pretty solid guess as to what it means metaphysics is all about the nature of reality what exists how does it exist basically a subject that is beyond our physical world and basic five senses and the word awareness is just that you're suddenly made aware of something so what we have here is that this intruder or these otherworldly beings are telling their targets the nature of reality or maybe a lie about it which in turn causes the victim to lose their mind and ultimately end their own life actually very reminiscent of the opening lines of h.p lovecraft's call of cthulhu which is also about reality our existence and how we can never truly comprehend the nature of that existence quote the most merciful thing in the world i think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far the sciences each draining in its own direction have hitherto harmed us little but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age in short this is what i think's going on with the mad disorder in mandela catalog other worldly beings telling people about their place in reality and us humans are just unable to comprehend it which leads to a sudden and tragic end of our lives as the video says only three percent are able to be cured of this and if these quote unquote angels are indeed some sort of demon or alien well those are the exact type of creatures that would be able to speak on something like the subject of reality so in summary we have ourselves satan or some alien but probably satan disguising himself as a human to shape the world's religions he's spreading fear via the newest and hottest technology of the 80s television and also spreading words about the true nature of reality in order to crush the lies of anyone he tells meanwhile we have another intruder which may or may not be the same character using the spectrum of television to enter homes and steal away thousands of children talk about your feel-good horror stories for the holiday season and i'm not even done there's still a lot more to this story in the form of alternates unstoppable mutant doppelgangers as well as a mysterious society that's trying to piece things all back together with the help of a dead man and here's the twist friends this guy may not be as evil as he first appears but all that and more on the next installment because let me tell ya there's a lot to cover here so in the meantime you want to learn 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Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 4,172,976

Keywords: mandela catalogue, mandela catalog, mandela catalogue reaction, mandela catalogue react, mandela catalogue explained, the mandela catalogue, the mandela catalogue reaction, local 58, gemini home entertainment, walten files, matpat, film theory, film theorists, matpat mandela catalogue, film theory mandela catalogue, analog horror

Id: CeALigczlxI

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/non-number-name]

Was trying to post this, but you beat me to it.

I’m going to watch it now; let’s see if MatPat can pick up anything Wendigoon missed.