Capser Kelly hadn’t heard the internet term “breaking containment” before I bring it up in our interview, but he instantly gets the idea. It’s when something that’s intended for a more obscure, niche audience unexpectedly goes mainstream. That’s certainly what happened with Kelly’s most well-known work. Nearly 12 years ago, a deranged, 11-minute parody of old sitcom intros called Too Many Cooks aired on Adult Swim at 4:00 a.m. When somebody uploaded it to YouTube afterwards, it went insanely viral—to the point where the normies at CNN parodied it.
Now, Kelly’s breaking into the mainstream, so to speak. Although his brand of weird, horror-tinged comedy has been a mainstay on Adult Swim for decades, his first theatrical film, Buddy, is hitting theaters following a successful premiere at Sundance earlier this year. The movie, which is about children who are unknowingly trapped inside the world of a forgotten Barney-like television show starring a secretly sinister orange unicorn, is arguably one of the most normal things Kelly has made—which is saying something.
“I asked my manager. I’m like, ‘Is this too normal?'” Kelly recalls. “And he goes, ‘No, but it might be normal enough that someone will give you money to make it.”
At no point in making Buddy was Kelly deliberately trying to tone the twisted-ness down. “I really just try to do things that I like that interest me,” he explains, noting that it’s been pointed out that he seems to be very interested in being trapped. This feels appropriate, given our conversation about breaking containment. “If you like Too Many Cooks, this is me exploring some of those ideas of weaponized nostalgia and being trapped in a TV show, on a bigger scale.”
Delaney Quinn (who was heard but only briefly seen as Rose Byrne’s daughter in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) stars in Buddy as a young girl who starts to realize that something is wrong in the titular unicorn’s seemingly happy world once another child goes missing. In the real world, Cristin Milioti plays a mother who suspects something is not right. Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy.
Delaney Quinn, Tristan Borders, Madison Skyy Polan, and Cristin Milioti Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films
The idea of a dark, twisted Barney—a subgenre Kelly calls mascot horror—isn’t new, with Five Nights at Freddy’s being the biggest modern example. Kids have been cracking anti-Barney jokes, like singing “I hate you/you hate me” to parody the purple dinosaur’s loving message, for decades. Kelly says his own children knew the song, a version of which is a plot point in Buddy, from more or less the moment they first learned about Barney. “It made me wonder why he is hated, and interrogate that.”
“When I was a kid, I thought the kids lived in the TV show, and when I first saw kids breaking out into song, it kind of disturbed me,” Kelly says. “How would they all know to do that? What’s going on? Are they brainwashed?” Buddy builds on these innocent fears, telling a story about gaslighting and the hidden darkness that can exist within beloved authority figures.
Between the relevant themes and the emotional arc, there is, in Kelly’s own admission, a bit more going on in Buddy than in Too Many Cooks — and most of Kelly’s earlier work, too. This includes Adult Swim shows like Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell and his two previous, non-theatrical movies, Yule Log and its sequel. (These last two Adult Swim films, which begin as normal footage of a fire in a fireplace before spiraling out of control into a meta-textual narrative about murder, time travel, and aliens, are feature-length but not exactly mainstream popcorn fare.)
Buddy arrives on the heels of Obsession and Backrooms, two smash-hit horror movies whose young filmmakers, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, got their start on YouTube. Most of Kelly’s work has been on cable television, but his biggest hit became as popular as it did because of the same platform that helped launch Barker and Parsons. Buddy also has echoes of creepypasta—a term for scary stories that originated on online forums—and features a ’90s-esque setting like Backrooms, too. Considering that Too Many Cooks went viral when the current generation of horror wunderkinds were children, does Kelly feel at all like an elder statesman of this internet-turned-theatrical horror wave?
“I feel elder, but I don’t know if I feel like a statesman,” says Kelly, who somewhat sheepishly describes himself as “safely Gen X.” “I’m kind of breaking in late. I could learn from them as easily as they could learn from me.” Though clearly well-versed with the world wide web, Kelly hasn’t made much content specifically for the internet. He also doesn’t quite see himself as a classical media man, at home in the more-established TV and movie fields.
“I think I’m a person who’s trying to do what I want to do, often through trickery, and not always in the world it should be in,” Kelly says. One of his first jobs was making bumps—little animated interstitials before and after commercial breaks—for Cartoon Network. In one instance, Kelly turned these little pre-advertising bits into multi-part skits that could be edited together into a short film, like a Scooby-Doo parody of The Blair Witch Project that originally aired in mico-installments during a 1999 Halloween marathon.
Buddy in Buddy Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films
Still, making a movie for movie theaters—one of the most traditional forms of mass entertainment—feels very overdue for Kelly. When Too Many Cooks became a sensation, it opened up a lot of doors for him. He had already created two Adult Swim shows and written for many other cartoons when Too Many Cooks came out, but it was the viral short that got him meetings.
“Too Many Cooks gave me a certain baseline of confidence that I never had,” Kelly reflects. “You know, like in Dungeons & Dragons, ‘a +5 to confidence.'” He admits that he’s kicking himself, a little bit, for not acting on that newfound confidence as much as he thinks he could have. “I wish I had done seven movies,” he says. Making a movie was so important that he developed writer’s block borne from anxiety. It was only when he was forced to finish a script for Yule Log on a deadline that he overcame the block. Now he’s made “three and a half” films, if you count a segment he made for the horror anthology film V/H/S/Halloween.
Kelly hopes Buddy is a containment-breaking success so that he can make more movies. But he doesn’t want to think too much about where he fits into the future of horror cinema, which can be attributed in part to the fact that Kelly isn’t just a horror filmmaker. Buddy, like Too Many Cooks before it, is funny.
“If you go to a haunted house, you hear a lot of screams,”Kelly says. “And then they laugh afterwards.” He doesn’t, however, approach Buddy or anything else he makes from that horror/comedy binary. Though he’s made a career out of works that explore the breakdown of reality, Kelly says he tries to approach things from a place of truth.
“If this happened, what would happen next?” he asks. And with Kelly, sometimes the thing that happens next is a big friendly-looking unicorn going on a murderous rampage. “Then I let the comedy and horror come in as it may.”
Correction, Aug. 28
The original version of this story misstated the film festival where Buddy premiered. It was at Sundance, not SXSW.
