Casper Kelly almost passed on the killer unicorn movie. The pitch arrived fully built, and it was the exact kind of thing he thought had already been done to death.
We caught the Fantasia screening of Buddy on August 1 and stayed for the Q&A that followed, where Kelly walked the crowd through how a work-for-hire mascot horror pitch turned into something a lot more personal. Everything Kelly says below comes from that conversation.
Why Casper Kelly Almost Turned Down the Barney Horror Movie
The idea started with producer J.D. Lifshitz at BoulderLight Pictures. “They were obsessed with doing a Barney based horror movie,” Kelly said. His first instinct was to pass.
I was at first not sure because there’s a lot of mascot horror movies.
He has said something similar before. In a January feature, Kelly told Variety that Five Nights at Freddy’s, The Banana Splits Movie and Willy’s Wonderland had already worked the same ground. What changed his mind was the conversation itself.
We started talking about it and then I’m like, hell yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s do the Barney.
He came back with a condition. One show was not going to be enough. “I wanna do every other kids show that my kids watched in the nineties so I can hopefully do the final statement on nineties,” he said. “It was fun.”
The Dance Party That Opens Buddy and the Question Behind It
The movie opens on exactly that scenario. A kid named Josh, one of the children on Buddy’s show, will not join the dance party thrown in Buddy’s honor. Buddy reads the refusal as a skill problem and hands him a pair of shoes that do the dancing for him. Josh still says no. He just does not want to dance. So Buddy kills him.
The way in was something Kelly noticed about himself while watching kids’ television.
“I always wondered when I watch shows because I’m very awkward in dancing,” he said. “This might be a shock to you but yes, I’m not a great dancer.“
That turned into a question he could not put down.
I always wondered when a kid, if a kid didn’t do what the script wanted you to do in the show, what would happen?
From there, he started treating the show as a system with laws. The episode has to close out a specific way. Until it does, the next show cannot start, and nothing resets to normal, which is why Buddy keeps pushing to finish the script no matter what it costs the kids standing in front of him.
I like the idea of a world and he’s trying to end the episode and I like starting to build rules around the show.
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The Missing Person Feeling That Built Buddy and Its Real World Half
Josh does not stay gone for long, exactly. Another kid slides into his slot on the show, and everyone is expected to carry on as if nothing happened. The other children notice fast that the boy standing there is not the boy who was there yesterday.
The second seed is the stranger one, and it produced the film’s real-world half.
I always feel like there’s someone missing like when I have a group of friends over or something and I feel like there’s someone missing.
Kelly said. “It’s like a deja vu but a missing.”
He assumed everyone carried that around. “I thought this was a universal feeling I was tapping into but apparently it’s not,” he said. “It’s just me.”
That absence is where the suburban material came from.
That kind of spurred some of that real world stuff.
He also confirmed a “little poltergeist nod” written into one of the characters, which lines up with what critics clocked at Sundance. Variety’s review singled out the sequence where Cristin Milioti’s character gets pulled through the television set.
Kelly pointed to smaller connective tissue too, noting that the husband and Buddy share some of the same phrasing. “We had a deal,” he offered as one example.
He piled on one more reference while he had the chance. “I kinda wanted to do Wizard of Oz too,” he said, framing the overstuffing as insurance.
Who knows if they’ll let me do another movie.
Asked whether there will be more stories set in this world, he handed the question straight back to the room. “From your lips to God’s ears,” Kelly said.
If everybody goes here, goes to see it and tells their friends, maybe we’ll get to make more.
Buddy opens in theaters August 28 from Roadside Attractions and Saban Films.