Buddy is a weird and special horror film.

I went in absolutely cold to this film: I did not know who made it, who starred in it, or what it was about.

I came out of the theater delighted. Buddy was an undeniably twisted, subversive, and high quality production; a film chock-a-block with hidden meanings, subtle themes, and outright horror. It also has an incredible cast and was created and directed by a certified whacked out genius. Before we go any further, you need to watch this video:

Now that you are acquainted with the absolute genius that is Too Many Cooks. We need to talk about the creator, Casper Kelly. Kelly burst onto the scene with the viral video up above and then proceeded to absolutely rock Adult Swim with the series Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell. An Emmy-winning, hilarious work place comedy that takes place in the bowels of Hell.

My favorite Casper clip comes from a favorite film of mine, Mandy. Casper is responsible for one of the greatest WTF moments in that film (and that is a hard thing to do in film stuffed with WTF moments). Casper’s creation is pictured below and if you know, you know. If you don’t, watch Mandy.

Now those in the know are going to ask why Yule Log hasn’t been mentioned yet. That’s on purpose. Before he directed Buddy, Casper directed a different featured length film. A few years ago, Adult Swim quietly put a Yule Log video on their channel and slapped an MA rating on it. The film starts off with a yule log and then turns into a home invasion, rape, and murder and then it turns into a supernatural tale. The yule log they are burning comes from a sacred tree, soaked with the blood of a generation or two of hanged me. The log burning releases a curse and all the awfulness that unfurls is a result of that released evil. It is a subtle and disturbing film, filled with slasher tropes and blood and horror and filmed with a single camera that during the first half of the film never leaves its single location. When the camera does move it does so with purpose, becoming the curse that haunts the vacationers. Meanwhile, a degenerate woman and her masked and murderous son lurk in the background and bring even more tension to the film. Instead the horror dances around the peripherals of the film until it absolutely goes off the rails. Check it out on Adult Swim, Hulu or YouTube. The full, free version on YouTube is not great quality, just as an FYI.

Yule Log (aka The Fireplace) is a great film and watching it gives you an idea of the complexity that is the horror of Buddy. Yule Log is full of complex ideas and concepts that merge time and space and history into one surreal and disturbing film. Buddy is similar. The internet is now completely full of think pieces and hot takes about Buddy as a metaphor for Trump, for gaslighting, misogyny, and a host of other societal woes. All of those things are in the film, the hot takes are not wrong necessarily, but I feel that every viewer will take away a different set of ideas from this film and I don’t want to influence that. Instead I want to focus on the liminality of Buddy.

Liminal horror is the hottest thing going this summer and it is one of my favorite subgenres of horror. It is about time that it is becoming more and more mainstream, and I am excited for the future of liminal horror. Earlier this summer we had Exit 8 and The Backrooms make a splash with critics and at the box office. These films both deal with similar approaches to liminal horror; the slip. In both films, the main characters slip into a liminal place by accident and then spend the remainder of the runtime exploring their new surroundings while either trying to go deeper or to get out. Buddy goes in a very different direction.

In the film, we start out in a children’s television program, the world of which is a hyper-rich, and fully kinetic set full of odd ball characters and talking objects like a mailbox and a back pack. Here is where we meet Buddy, the man in the fur suit (or so we think) who hosts the show. At first it feels like a typical kids’ show, but slowly as the opening progresses the show becomes more and more sinister until we know for sure that SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT here. The caps? Oh those were intentional, because that is how you feel watching the movie, you kind of want to scream as your skin starts to crawl.

We quickly find out that the world these kids find themselves in is not make-believe at all. It is a pocket universe where these children have been snatched to by nefarious means. The whole set is a real world and there is more beyond the walls of Buddy’s compound.

This liminal space tells us an interesting story, kids lured are lured here by an ad that runs on the television. A version of Buddy tells the child that it’s ok to feel alone and that he can make it all ok. Most times if the child takes Buddy’s invitation to take his hand, the child only touches glass. But sometimes Buddy is lurking behind the screen and when he is there, he reaches back. Pulled into the television studio from which Buddy (and his brothers?) broadcast, the child (or adult!) is then assimilated into the world. Buddy needs the connection so that he can continue to produce episodes of his show, giving him God like control over the world he exists in. As the kids are murdered, or choose to exit this world on their own terms, Buddy simply finds a replacement.

There seems to have been some kind of internal struggle, during which Buddy overthrew and/or enslaved the others and became the head deity in charge. The most fascinating thing to me was the rules that Buddy had to abide by even though he controlled the space. The well is off limits to him, he needs living beings to end the show and reset the world, and the world beyond the set of the show is full of death and danger. It’s such a fully realized nightmare that I hope there are other connections to it in Casper’s next films and tv shows.

I also want to touch on the effects of the liminal on the real, as the people taken by Buddy are forgotten (for the most part) as they are absorbed into the set. We are not given any idea of what happens when a child or adult escapes the set and makes it back to the real world.

This is where I transition from stuff about the film to the film itself. The direction is excellent, the acting top notch, the effects are wonderful. All of this is true, it is also true that the way the film is cut together could have worked even better if they had allowed Casper to intersperse the real world storyline with episodes from Buddy’s world. I can see a world where there is a director’s cut to this effect. It would have made the film a little more disjointed but the real world stuff would have benefited from the chunking I think as it drags a bit in the middle.

Overall Buddy is wonderful nightmare fuel and well worth a trip to the theaters this weekend. A solid 8/10 or 4/5 or six thumbs up or whatever the heck you want.