#but i'm not a horror fan and didn't find it all very enthralling

[bacon-sandwich-of-dionysus]

Mandela Catalogue and the horror of not knowing 'why'

I'm gonna preface this by saying I impulsively scrawled this down on a whim- this is clumsy and prolly full of grammar mistakes. Sorry about that :/

I honestly have never encountered an analogue horror series that had an impact on me like Mandela Catalogue.

I'm a bit of an avid horror fan, so I am a little desensitised to the tropes, the scares and the stories. I think horror is actually quite a hard genre to write because it's very easy to fall into the formulaic way of doing things and also difficult to create a compelling story with the right amount of twists and turns, plus you're doing all this while also trying to actually scare people. Horror always seeks to make impact and because it's frantically firing rounds here, there and everywhere, it's really hard to hit the target.

This is where the Mandela Catalogue comes in... but I'll take a quick side to talk about another horror franchise so we can get a better idea of what the hell I'm getting at lol.

When the first FNAF game came out, I was enthralled by the horrific idea of dead children haunting animatronic suits, aimlessly wandering about in hopes of getting their revenge on their killer. The subject of the Purple Guy was such a massive topic way back when, that it was hard to avoid the character. Best of all though, it was hard to work out why he did it. Why did he commit such a heinous crime? What was he getting out of it? We didn't even know his name, let alone his personality, his reasoning or his face.

The mystery of 'why' was the biggest piece missing from the puzzle, teasing us at what we didn't know. And to add salt to the wound, what we didn't know outweighed what we did. 'Why were things they way they were? Why did the Purple Guy do what he did?' was what certainly frightened me back then.

An unanswered question is something I'll always find more terrifying. As humans, I think we're constantly wanting to rationalise everything- it's just who we are, we like explaining things away. So when someone or something commits an action out of the norm with no particular explanation, it frightens us.

'Why' is what made FNAF scary. And explaining that 'why' so elaborately has taken some of that horror away. Now, I'm still invested in FNAF and will always be happy to engage with new instalments, works and whatnot, but unfortunately, I'm not enjoying it as much as I used to because things have become so convoluted and entwined. Putting names to faces, family troubles and sci-fi concepts like Remnant, have kind of taken that grounded-horror-feel away from the original franchise. Now, that's not to say FNAF is a shadow of its former self, I just personally am not as into it as I once was, and I think that's because of the lack of mystery. I'm no longer asking 'why'. I'm more of just staring at the screen with knitted eyebrows as I wonder how the hell Fazbear Entertainment hasn't gone under already at this rate of innumerable scandals attributed to its name... maybe that company is just as stubborn as Afton, who knows.

Mandela Catalogue on the other hand, has exploited our fear of the unknown excellently. I am genuinely terrified of the main antagonist of this series, a.k.a Satan (though it is up for debate as to whether he is Satan, an alien or even fallen Gabriel but I'll be going along the lines that he's the devil).

Satan has always been a fascinating concept to me, partly because I've always been intrigued by the idea of something so ungodly even its own creator isn't really sure what to do with him, but also because we don't really know his whole story. Satan is hardly mentioned in the Bible, he's kind of elaborated on in other scriptures but again, not much is known about him other than that he's the bad guy and he's not gonna win in the end because no one can withstand the might of God.

Mandela Catalogue, uses that fear of unequivocal evil compounded with mystery to make Satan terrifying. What I love about the series is we don't see much of Satan and we don't know why the fuck he's doing what he's doing.

All we know us that he's executing his plan and we're bearing the brunt of it. And that's frightening on an existential level.

He knows what's going on, he's doing whatever he's doing, he knows why he's doing it and we don't.

That's how you do horror like this. You don't tell your audience 'why'.

Now, we can try to give some reasoning, using reference to previous depictions of Satan and also the Bible itself to suggest that maybe he's taking revenge on God, or maybe that he wants to be God, or that perhaps he's jealous that Jesus is the new favourite and lashing out at him, but we can't definitively take these reasons as gospel (pardon the pun :P).

That's what's so scary, we don't know why, we can't explain this and because we can't explain this... we can't predict, we can't prepare and we can't understand.

Mandela Catalogue exploits our need for reason to create a villain so terrifying that he hardly ever needs to show up- we can just behold his work and dread.

#ah yes writing #writing #mandela catalogue #analog horror #fnaf #horror #args #alex kister #fear #existential dread