An orange unicorn mascot walking through fake-looking woods with an axe in his hand. That was the still that got released out of Sundance back in January, and it did exactly what a still like that is supposed to do. Meaghan put it best: “I was like, what the fuck is this?” Then the official trailer dropped a few months later, and everybody went bonkers.
We caught Buddy at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2026, where it played its international premiere. We stuck around for the Q and A with director Casper Kelly afterward (always stick around for the Fantasia Q and A, it is worth the extra thirty minutes). Now that the film is finally getting its wide theatrical release on August 28, we can talk about it properly.
Short version first: it is all that it is hyped up to be.
Buddy (2026) Turns 90s Kids TV Into a Horror Movie
Casper Kelly is the guy who made Too Many Cooks, the Adult Swim short that ate the internet alive and pulled apart 80s and 90s sitcom formulas until they screamed. Buddy is that same instinct pointed at a different target. This time it is 90s children’s television, the preschool programming block, the thing a lot of us were parked in front of before we could read.
Arthur summed the pitch up in one line:
Imagine if Barney, the TV show, was horror.
That is basically the shape of it. Barney and Friends ran for fourteen seasons and 268 episodes, aimed squarely at kids aged two to five, and Meaghan was one of those kids. Obsessed with it. There is a specific kind of memory attached to a show like that, where the characters on screen genuinely felt like friends who lived in the television. Buddy knows that. Buddy is built on top of that.
Kelly told the Fantasia crowd that the idea came from wondering what would happen if one of the kids on a show like that just went off script. Refused to do the thing. Said no to the dancing or the singing or the lesson of the day. That question is the whole movie, and the answer arrives inside the first five minutes. Everything devolves into chaos from there.
The Buddy Cast: Cristin Milioti, Keegan-Michael Key and Delaney Quinn
The official synopsis gives you almost nothing, which is a choice we respect. A brave girl and her friends must escape a kids’ television show. Ba-bam. That is the whole thing.
The brave girl is Freddy, played by Delaney Quinn, who was 11 when we saw the film and closer to 10 when they shot it. She carries the film.
Cristin Milioti plays Grace, the mother in the second half of the story, and she is fantastic in everything (she took home the Emmy for The Penguin, and it was earned).
Topher Grace plays Ben, Grace’s husband. Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy himself and does an excellent job with it. Patton Oswalt voices Strappy, a sentient backpack with a zipper mouth on the front pocket who talks to Freddy. Michael Shannon shows up as Charlie the Train, and as Willie, a ventriloquist doll, because of course he does.
The kids around Freddy are the thing we keep coming back to, though. Oliver, Hannah, Wade, Tyler, Josh. We have watched a lot of horror where the child casting clearly happened fast because somebody was cute, and you can feel it in every scene they are in. Horror is hard.
You have to convey a lot of different emotions and hold a lot of tension in a genre that gives you very little to hold onto. These kids do it. Every one of them is believable as a child trapped in a situation that should not exist, and the moment where the realization lands on each of them is played straight and clean.
Kelly mentioned during the Q and A that Delaney Quinn is into horror and specifically told him she had always wanted to play a final girl. She was ten. We love that so much. We hope she does horror forever, and we hope she is the final girl in all of it.
He also pointed out that you cannot hide a horror movie from a kid the way older productions used to try. He brought up the Shining approach, where the child is told it is a drama and simply kept away from the scary material. That does not work when there are wide shots and blood getting splattered on the actors. As Meaghan put it: “there wouldn’t have been any way of getting away with it.”
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The Two Timelines and Diamond City
Buddy runs two stories that eventually merge, and they merge cleanly. The first is inside the show itself, where Freddy and the other children live in the world of It’s Buddy! and slowly (not that slowly, actually, we are talking five minutes in) figure out that something is deeply wrong with the giant orange unicorn they are supposed to love. Buddy kills one of them early. That kid gets replaced with a new kid, because every role on the show has to stay filled.
That replacement mechanic is one of the funniest and meanest things in the film, because it is exactly what used to happen on real kids’ TV when a child aged out. On Barney, the new kid just showed up, and nobody blinked. In Buddy, the new kid shows up and starts suggesting that maybe Buddy is not so bad, and one of the veterans immediately shuts them down. “What do you know? You just got here.” That line got us.
The second story follows Grace, her husband, and their two sons in the suburbs in the present day. Grace starts feeling that something in her life is missing and she cannot name it. She catches pieces of It’s Buddy! on television and starts connecting dots she does not fully understand yet. It is a mystery structure, and it works, mostly because Milioti sells the low hum of a person who knows something is wrong long before she has proof.
The kids try to escape to Diamond City. Wizard of Oz references, people. They get there and find out it is a miniature in the background, tall only because it was built to look tall from a distance. The lore around how the children get killed and replaced pays off at the end and carries a real message with it, which we are not going to spell out. There is also an image late in the film that opens the door to spin-offs, and Kelly confirmed at the Q and A that if this one does well, other things could happen.
Practical Effects and Character Design Are the Reason Buddy Works
The supporting cast of the in-show world is stacked with things that should not be funny and are. A mailbox with little eyes that talks. A mailman who gets scolded for trying to hand the kids their mail directly (“why are you trying to take someone’s job here?“). Talking flowers. A Worry Well that takes in children’s worries and hands back solutions. Betty Bunny, who is one of Buddy’s helpers and friends with the kids. A tiny bluebird that a junior puppeteer apparently designed, which goes boop boop and nearly falls off its branch. That bird is perfect.
None of it feels random. Every one of these characters has a voice and a personality and a job inside the world, which is why the uncanny quality lands instead of just being weird for weird’s sake. Everything is also a song, because that is how these shows worked, and the songs are written well enough that you sit there nodding along, going, yep, we definitely saw that one as kids.
The set is the other half of it. Everything is period accurate to a fault, from the color grading to the hand-painted matte backgrounds to the oversized cartoonish proportions of the clubhouse and the treehouse. Kids TV in that era always looked slightly too big, like the world was scaled to a child’s perspective, and Buddy nails that scale. Somebody did serious research, and it shows in every corner of the frame.
Then there is Buddy himself. The character design is the standout, and it gets better (worse?) as the film goes on, because the kids have to defend themselves against a creature that is actively trying to kill them with a hatchet. When you injure Buddy, things happen to Buddy.
It looks like a suit with a person inside, which is how it would work in real life, except it is not a suit and there is no person. There is flesh under there.
Buddy becomes something else, let’s put it that way.
The costume changes across the runtime are incredible, and the practical effects across the board are excellent and there are a lot of them.
Buddy Review Score: Should You See It in Theatres?
We both landed on 8.5 out of 10, independently, without comparing notes first.
Buddy is not a film that digs deep into theme, and it is not trying to be. What it is instead is a film that gets absolutely everything right about what it is doing, and it lives in that fun horror camp that people are specifically looking for when they go to a genre festival.
Practical effects, gore, kills that land, a nostalgia hit sitting underneath all of it that occasionally turns to dread. There is one storyline in the modern-day section about Grace’s husband dismissing her instincts that is a little heavy-handed at moments, though it plays into the same 90s sitcom dynamic the rest of the film is picking apart. She has a line about giving everything for her family that is going to hit hard for a lot of parents watching.
Watch it with a group if you can. We saw it in a packed Fantasia house, and the reactions in that room made it better. Arthur was laughing for half the movie.
Go see it in theatres if it is playing near you. Support the filmmakers so they can keep making things like this. And when you do, come back and tell us what you thought, what you liked, and what we forgot to talk about.