Mandy: The Black Skulls' Origin & Mythos Explained | Screen Rant
Panos Cosmatos’ 2018 surreal horror film, Mandy follows Nicholas Cage as Red Miller on a brutal and bizarre journey to save his girlfriend Mandy and get revenge on the people who hurt her. The film leads Cage through battles with the Black Skulls, a sadomasochistic biker gang, and a deviant hippie cult reminiscent of the Manson family.
When Jeremiah, the leader of a local cult group called Children of the New Dawn, passes Mandy on her way to work he decides he needs to have her for his own. Not interested in trying to entice her to join the group of her own volition, he turns to a demonic biker gang, the Black Skulls, to capture her and Red, and bring them back to him.
Summoned by a strange stone flute and receiving payment in the sacrifice of one of the cult members, the Black Skulls seem to be part human and part demon, but are they really just a regular group of sadists, or is there more to them than meets the eye?
Serving up a look highly reminiscent of Hellraiser’s cenobites, the Black Skulls are said to be former drug couriers who took a tainted batch of LSD that shattered their minds and turned them into a group of bloodthirsty monsters interested only in experiencing and inflicting pain.
When Red visits his friend Caruthers, played by Bill Duke, for more information on the Black Skulls and how to track them down after they kill Mandy, Caruthers tells him that there have been rumors for a while about a group of bikers that’s pure evil. The stories say that they’re the cause of multiple deaths, missing truckers, prostitutes, and gutted bodies left on doorsteps. Caruthers tells Red that they were originally drug couriers for an LSD manufacturer who, for whatever reason, decided to enact vengeance upon them and cook them a “special batch”. Ever since they took the drug, they’d never been the same.
This is where the stories take a turn towards the supernatural, indicating that there’s mixed opinions even amongst the locals over whether the biker gang is wholly human or not. Caruthers says, “People say they live in the trees; come and go with the wind. Commune with some dark dimension”. He also says they’re no longer able to process reality in the way that most humans experience it, and that what they’ve become is more akin to rabid animals than any normal human.
Caruthers’ description does seem to indicate that there are two possible interpretations of the Black Skulls: they’re normal humans that were simply driven insane through drug use, or they have now become something more than human after communing with a dark dimension that gives them their strength and power.
The Black Skulls are summoned seemingly out of nowhere by a strange stone flute known as the Horn of Abraxas and paid for murder in blood sacrifice. The name ‘Abraxas’ originates from the Gnostic Basilides and has both mystical and demonic associations. The combination of the flute and the blood sacrifice indicates that summoning the Black Skulls exists as a sort of magical ritual, and that they must be given the proper offering to do the summoner's bidding. However, once Red samples the tainted LSD everything in the third act goes up for interpretation anyway as Red becomes an unreliable narrator. Though his experience does indicate that the drug gives him the strength to crush Jeremiah’s head with his bare hands, even though he sampled only the tiniest taste of the drug.
Unfortunately for audiences looking for clarity, Mandy is a film that chooses to leave many ends untied, meaning that it’s up to the viewer to decide on which interpretation feels most satisfying. Are the Black Skulls a group of bikers broken through drug use, or does their strange drug give them a connection to a demonic realm of pain and hatred? Both are equally possible within Panos Cosmatos' vivid, violent world.