Casper Kelly | Buddy | Roadside Attractions and Saban Films | August 2026 | 96 minutes

It’s understandable to come into Casper Kelly’s debut theatrical film with a certain degree of apprehension and preconceived notions. When his Adult Swim short film Too Many Cooks went viral all the way back in 2014, it was praised for its evolving loop format, the accuracies of its sitcom-opening parody, along with its surprise turn into postmodern horror, years before Doki Doki Literature Club caught fire with a similar basic concept in dating sim format. At the same time, as clever as Too Many Cooks is, it also begins and ends at an assembly of creative tricks. While Kelly has been widely involved in film and television since the ‘90s when he was a writer on CatDog, Too Many Cooks is, without question, his primary claim to fame. Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell was a moderate success for the Adult Swim network, and he’s since directed two horror-comedy Adult Swim Yule Log TV/streaming movies and the “Fun Size” segment of the poorly-received V/H/S/Halloween film, but most will go into Buddy familiar with Too Many Cooks, see the big Barney-esque orange unicorn, and assume that it’ll beholden to its gimmick: a shallow and stretched-out reskin of his big hit. Happily, I can say that Buddy is not only much more than that, but perhaps the boldest and most original horror film of 2026, miraculously maintaining its genuinely uncomfortable tone amidst its madcap absurdism while weaving a thoughtful commentary on children’s programming underneath all the chaos.

That’s children’s programming as both noun and verb, by the way. We’ll get to it. The first section of Buddy is, admittedly, very similar to Too Many Cooks in its basic structure. The set of the fictional It’s Buddy! ‘90s children’s show is lovingly crafted as a seemingly authentic but slightly uncanny mashup of Barney and Pee-wee’s Playhouse, with smaller nods to series such as Blue’s Clues and Thomas the Tank Engine. There are tons of visual Easter eggs throughout Buddy from these set and character details, to the credits at the end of each “episode,” but Kelly wisely never stops to point at them. One of the most exciting things to me about the prospect of rewatching is how many additional layers there’ll be to uncover with a pause option available.

But let’s talk about these “episodes.” Buddy begins innocently enough as the children receive invites to Buddy the Unicorn’s dance party. Buddy seems friendly enough until one of the children refuses to dance for him, wishing to read instead. By the end of the first short episode, Buddy’s mask slips as we hear Buddy attack the child offscreen.

What’s fascinating about this is twofold. First, Buddy (suit-acted by Sergey Zhuravsky and voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is, for the most part, friendly: but only if you do not exercise any independent thought. Beneath the monstrous unicorn is your garden-variety narcissistic sociopath, showing favor to his “friends” until his control slips and he lashes out in violence. By the end of the third loop, it’s established that if Buddy is wounded, the only way he can roll credits on the episode and heal is with a hug, from a living child. The only way to kill Buddy is to deprive him of love.

The other interesting element here is that while I won’t say how many of the children in Buddy meet tragic ends, multiple do, and every child death is either offscreen or bloodless. This is, uniformly, not the case with adult or other character deaths. This could simply be a case of taste: it’s not exactly fun to watch kids die. But while we never see the brutality enacted upon these children directly, Kelly makes us painfully aware of it as they are beaten, cut, impaled, crushed, or devoured, letting their anguished pleas stretch out for deeply uncomfortable periods of time as they suffer just out of view.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because that’s the history of exploitation of child actors. It’s impossible to watch Buddy and not think about Dan Schneider and Nickelodeon, or the litany of past child stars who have grown into maladaptive adults as a result of persistent abuse from the directors and showrunners who have employed them. Even those who do not sustain apparent and obvious abuse are left damaged as a result of being thrust into a world they are simply not mentally or emotionally prepared for. Even this is symbolized within the film as Buddy reveals itself as a portal film, abductions taking place directly through the television screen as dead characters are simply replaced by Buddy and brainwashed, stripped of all individuality.

Further credit to Kelly for covering so many bases in-between the most obvious surface level themes, from the complacent “adult” Betty Bunny telling the children to just apologize to Buddy and tell him that they love him when he turns into a rampaging beast, to the odd pair of George and Willie. George, an old man who was a child during a Western-themed version of It’s Buddy!, is stunted and mentally childlike, subordinate to the literal marionette that is Willie. At one point, he attempts a sexual advance on one of the children in a moment some may dismiss as pure shock value, but reads as a clear-eyed commentary on cycles of abuse. Diamond City, the emblem of hope throughout Buddy, is also not exactly what it’s purported to be. The symbolic structures within Buddy are airtight and consistently meaningful in ways that genuinely shocked me time after time.

And as much depth as it has, I feel like I’m underselling how funny Buddy is, despite still managing to honor the seriousness of its subject matter. Some laughs are just nervous, as Buddy plays “why are you cutting yourself?” with one kid, while others, like when Buddy rips the face off a Thomas the Tank Engine parody and it sputters up oil, strike a bizarre tone of hilariously ridiculous and psychically uncomfortable. Kelly extends a lot of empathy to Buddy’s anthropomorphic characters: helpless props subject to the cruelty of their circumstances. One child, Hannah (played by Madison Skyy Polan), totes around a mutilated Mr. Mailbox alongside Strappy the Backpack (voiced by Patton Oswalt), viewing them as being just as worth saving as the kids. She wrestles with survivor’s guilt regarding an early death throughout the film and in many ways, projects her own sense of helplessness upon Mr. Mailbox and Strappy.

Buddy feels like the type of horror film that is at least somewhat doomed to be misinterpreted. It’s too brainy to be dismissed as schlock, too insane to be taken as “elevated” horror. And yet this gray area is my sweet spot. This is not Five Nights at Freddy’s or It. This is my platonic ideal for horror: wildly, unabashedly creative and fun, while still making me think and leaving me haunted when it ends. Even those who “survive” the world of children’s programming can never return to the way things were.

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Travis Shosa is a writer from Spring, TX. They are the EIC and managing editor of Dodo Eraser. Their creative writing is featured in Stanchion, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, The Bulb Region, HAWKEYE, Some Words and lots of other cool places. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, and others.