If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.
“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely. “But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”
Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office. He knows it’s weird.
“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says. Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant. His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.
The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge. The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.
A scene from “Buddy,” directed by Casper Kelly.
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch. But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.
“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says. “If someone’s reputation is too good, you wonder if something’s going on.”
While “Buddy” represents Kelly’s first theatrically released project, his affinity for parodying familiar media to unsettling ends first received mainstream attention with 2014’s “Too Many Cooks,” a short film for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It’s a parody of an old sitcom’s opening credits (think “The Brady Bunch,” “Family Ties” or “Full House”) in which characters are introduced alongside the actors’ names on screen while a catchy theme song plays, over and over. Eventually a killer begins murdering the cast. Kelly’s two children, who are now 20 and 22, make cameos in “Too Many Cooks” as part of a video grid.
Twenty-eight million views on YouTube certified the bizarre piece as a fan favorite. But why do people adore it more than a decade on?
“I think it was the music and the repetition but also we were doing a show at the same time [“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), so we had a year off and on to tweak the edit and the timing so we could really hone in,” he theorizes. “It was a lot of just precision and execution, maybe.”
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says of the new wave of offbeat storytellers emerging from online platforms to big success. “I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Raised on MAD Magazine, Kelly first started working for Cartoon Network in the 1990s creating promos that often played more like short films. One of them, “The Scooby-Doo Project,” satirized “The Blair Witch Project” with Scooby and his gang venturing into the woods. He eventually crossed over to Adult Swim, where he found a suitable home for his mischievous ideas.
Originally from North Carolina, Kelly is a self-proclaimed Southerner who’s resided in Atlanta for a long time. His first gig out of college was as a production assistant on the 1991 schlock-horror movie “Basket Case 3: The Progeny,” which was shot in Georgia.
“My mom was waiting up for me because she was nervous about me driving home at 2 a.m. from a shoot,” he recalls. “She knew I was going to [stick with it] because I was walking in with a big smile on my face from having worked on that movie.”
Contrary to what his work might suggest, Kelly didn’t really binge on horror films growing up. From the age of 10 to 15, Kelly lived in Saudi Arabia on account of his engineer father’s job. He would return to the U.S. every summer and consume everything from “The Outer Limits” to “Alice,” a sitcom. “I was an obsessive TV watcher,” he says.
Yet at a young age, even the 1975 action film “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” terrified him. “It’s not a particularly great movie but it had these green glowing flying snakes,” he remembers. “You would open a drawer and these flying green glowing snakes would fly out. That scared me and I was afraid to get my pajamas out of the drawer.”
It wasn’t until recently that he mustered the courage to watch classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“I’m also drawn to a little bit of sadness,” he says about his tastes. “My boss at Adult Swim gives me a hard time about it. He’s like, ‘I don’t know why you like horror. You’re nothing like that.’ But if you meet horror people, a lot of them are happy people. It’s when you go to children’s television where you meet the miserable, angry people.”
That thoughtful vein is prominent in “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.” Co-directed with Nick Gibbons, the 2018 short takes the structure of a video-game explainer. Kelly’s version, however, becomes a philosophical infinity mirror.
“I weirdly got thinking about free will,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel like I have free will and sometimes I don’t. I feel like I might as well be played by another player. It became existential pretty quickly.”
“Too Many Cooks” and “Final Deployment” found their fandoms on YouTube. It’s there that young filmmakers like “Obsession’s” Curry Barker and Kane Parsons of “Backrooms” fame, also honed their talent.
“I admire that they learned quickly and they didn’t need a gatekeeper,” Kelly says of the prodigies that have taken this year’s box office by storm. “They didn’t have to do the traditional things so they could get their skills a lot faster, which is exciting as well.”
Kelly finds the public’s current craving for unique genre storytelling encouraging, but feels that like most trends, it may be doomed to impermanence.
“I don’t feel like an alien anymore,” Kelly says. “It does make me worry, though. It won’t last forever and then something else will come along, but I’m going to try my best to enjoy this while it lasts.”
Prior to “Buddy,” Kelly had directed two TV features: 2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (a.k.a. “The Fireplace”) and 2024’s “Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out.” Once again he clung onto an innocuous format — the innocent videos of a crackling fireplace often played during the holidays— and infused it with a collection of ominous references: serial killers, aliens, the U.S. history of slavery and, in the second installment, Hallmark movies.
“The dream would be that someone puts it on in the background and they’re having a party and then they suddenly look over and somebody’s head’s getting bashed in and they’re like, ‘What is happening here?’” he says, laughing.
Delaney Quinn in the movie “Buddy.”
(Roadside Attractions / Saban Films)
The suggestion that his movies are about people trying to escape a closed circuit or a nightmarish loop prompts him to recall an interview he did with SpectreVision, the production company behind the 2018 Nicolas Cage movie “Mandy,” for which Kelly directed the unforgettable Cheddar Goblin segment, a TV ad meant for the background that steals focus.
“They said the theme of being trapped seems to be a recurring theme in my work and I’m like, ‘I wish you guys hadn’t told me that because now I think about it,’” Kelly says. He smartly deflects.
“There’s a saying I really like: If you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author,” he says. “in the sense that they work intuitively and they might be dealing with obsessions they have a blind spot towards because they maybe think everybody else is obsessed. To them it’s normal. To me, part of the joy of making things is learning about myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know that he gravitates toward jokes that have a touch of “melancholy and embarrassment.”
“I guess I like cringe comedy,” Kelly says, outing himself as a fan of the awkward comedy duo Tim & Eric. “I like Instagrams where people are putting themselves out there and maybe they’re not the best at it, and I both find it funny but I do also empathize with them, too, and support them.”
Kelly pulls out his phone to show me a video of a woman whose account is dedicated to sharing puzzling life advice while she appears under an extreme beauty filter.
“I’m dipping nuggets you’ve never heard of into sources you could never understand,” she declares bluntly, causing us to cackle out of sheer surprise. Is she in on the joke and committed to the bit or oblivious and just being herself?
It’s unclear, but her absurd recommendations tickle Kelly.
With liminal spaces all the rage now, Kelly forged his own long ago, one in which you can laugh out loud but always with one eye open. Currently writing two screenplays in a similar vein, Kelly wants to capitalize on the momentum that “Buddy” has earned him since its packed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, to go full throttle into feature filmmaking.
But don’t be surprised if one day he makes a left turn into more traditional storytelling.
“I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh,” he says, almost shockingly. “I’d love to do something like that one day. There’s a part in ‘Buddy,’ an argument between a married couple, that is almost a drama that I think works well.”
