--- title: How Barney-esque Horror 'Buddy' Brought a Niche Filmmaker Into the Mainstream description: Casper Kelly's comedy slasher about kids stuck inside a Barney-like TV show is the culmination of a career that began with a viral YouTube '90s sitcom parody. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/08/28/buddy-casper-kelly-interview/ author: James Grebey article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-08-28T13:00:03.296Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-28T13:00:03.481Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Barney, But Make It Horror: How 'Buddy' Brought a Niche Filmmaker Into the Mainstream og:description: Casper Kelly's comedy slasher about kids stuck inside a Barney-like TV show is the culmination of a career that began with a viral YouTube '90s sitcom parody. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/08/28/buddy-casper-kelly-interview/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2fd3531bc73ec10f/6a8f9749e52494475b4b6386/buddy1.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3419 og:image:height: 1923 og:image:alt: buddy1.jpeg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Barney, But Make It Horror: How 'Buddy' Brought a Niche Filmmaker Into the Mainstream twitter:description: Casper Kelly's comedy slasher about kids stuck inside a Barney-like TV show is the culmination of a career that began with a viral YouTube '90s sitcom parody. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2fd3531bc73ec10f/6a8f9749e52494475b4b6386/buddy1.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Barney, But Make It Horror: How _Buddy_ Brought a Niche Filmmaker Into the Mainstream > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [James Grebey](https://time.com/author/james-grebey/) ## James Grebey Grebey is a contributor for TIME. Aug 28, 2026 1:00 PM UTC  Delaney Quinn in Buddy Delaney Quinn in BuddyCourtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films by [James Grebey](https://time.com/author/james-grebey/) ## James Grebey Grebey is a contributor for TIME. Aug 28, 2026 1:00 PM UTC Capser Kelly hadn't heard the internet term "breaking containment" before I bring it up in our interview, but he instantly gets the idea. It's when something that's intended for a more obscure, niche audience unexpectedly goes mainstream. That's certainly what happened with Kelly's most well-known work. Nearly 12 years ago, a deranged, 11-minute parody of old [sitcom](https://time.com/6317734/best-network-sitcoms-ever/) intros called _Too Many Cooks_ aired on [Adult Swim](https://time.com/collection/50-most-underappreciated-shows/2026/china-il/) at 4:00 a.m. When somebody uploaded it to YouTube afterwards, it went insanely viral—to the point where the normies at [CNN parodied it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6AlQiWatD4). Now, Kelly's breaking into the mainstream, so to speak. Although his brand of weird, horror-tinged comedy has been a mainstay on Adult Swim for decades, his first theatrical film, _Buddy_, is hitting theaters following a successful premiere at SXSW earlier this year. The movie, which is about children who are unknowingly trapped inside the world of a forgotten [_Barney_](https://time.com/4377504/barney-head-girl-firefighters/)\-like television show starring a secretly sinister orange unicorn, is arguably one of the most normal things Kelly has made—which is saying something. "I asked my manager. I'm like, 'Is this _too_ normal?'" Kelly recalls. "And he goes, 'No, but it might be normal enough that someone will give you money to make it." At no point in making _Buddy_ was Kelly deliberately trying to tone the twisted-ness down. "I really just try to do things that I like that interest me," he explains, noting that it's been pointed out that he seems to be very interested in being trapped. This feels appropriate, given our conversation about breaking containment. "If you like _Too Many Cooks_, this is me exploring some of those ideas of weaponized nostalgia and being trapped in a TV show, on a bigger scale." Delaney Quinn (who was heard but only briefly seen as [Rose Byrne’s](https://time.com/3892047/rose-byrne-the-woman-you-laugh-to-hate/) daughter in [_If I Had Legs I'd Kick You_](https://time.com/7324453/if-i-had-legs-id-kick-you-review-rose-byrne/)) stars in _Buddy_ as a young girl who starts to realize that something is wrong in the titular unicorn's seemingly happy world once another child goes missing. In the real world, [Cristin Milioti](https://time.com/collection/50-most-underappreciated-shows/2026/made-for-love/) plays a mother who suspects something is not right. Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy.  Delaney Quinn, Tristan Borders, Madison Skyy Polan, and Cristin Milioti Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films The idea of a dark, twisted _Barney_—a subgenre Kelly calls [mascot horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MascotHorror)—isn't new, with _Five Nights at Freddy's_ being the biggest modern example. Kids have been cracking [anti-Barney jokes](https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/barney-thirty-years-later/), like singing "I hate you/you hate me" to parody the purple dinosaur's loving message, for decades. Kelly says his own children knew the song, a version of which is a plot point in _Buddy_, from more or less the moment they first learned about _Barney_. "It made me wonder why he is hated, and interrogate that." "When I was a kid, I thought the kids lived in the TV show, and when I first saw kids breaking out into song, it kind of disturbed me," Kelly says. "How would they all know to do that? What's going on? Are they brainwashed?" _Buddy_ builds on these innocent fears, telling a story about gaslighting and the hidden darkness that can exist within beloved authority figures. Between the relevant themes and the emotional arc, there is, in Kelly's own admission, a bit more going on in _Buddy_ than in _Too Many Cooks_ — and most of Kelly's earlier work, too. This includes Adult Swim shows like _Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell_ and his two previous, non-theatrical movies, _Yule Log_ and its sequel. (These last two Adult Swim films, which begin as normal footage of a fire in a fireplace before spiraling out of control into a meta-textual narrative about murder, time travel, and aliens, are feature-length but not exactly mainstream popcorn fare.) _Buddy_ arrives on the heels of [_Obsession_](https://time.com/article/2026/05/13/obsession-curry-barker-interview/)and [_Backrooms_](https://time.com/article/2026/05/27/backrooms-movie-ending-explained/), two smash-hit [horror movies](https://time.com/6246026/low-budget-horror-movies-skinamarink/) whose young filmmakers, Curry Barker and [Kane Parsons](https://time.com/collection/time100-creators/2026/kane-parsons/), got their start on [YouTube](https://time.com/7337793/ceo-of-the-year-neal-mohan-youtube-politics-creators-kids-future/). Most of Kelly's work has been on cable television, but his biggest hit became as popular as it did because of the same platform that helped launch Barker and Parsons. _Buddy_ also has echoes of creepypasta—a term for scary stories that originated on online forums—and features a '90s-esque setting like _Backrooms_, too. Considering that _Too Many Cooks_ went viral when the current generation of horror wunderkinds were children, does Kelly feel at all like an elder statesman of this internet-turned-theatrical horror wave? "I feel elder, but I don't know if I feel like a statesman," says Kelly, who somewhat sheepishly describes himself as "safely Gen X." "I'm kind of breaking in late. I could learn from them as easily as they could learn from me." Though clearly well-versed with the world wide web, Kelly hasn't made much content specifically for the internet. He also doesn't quite see himself as a classical media man, at home in the more-established TV and movie fields. "I think I'm a person who's trying to do what I want to do, often through trickery, and not always in the world it should be in," Kelly says. One of his first jobs was making bumps—little animated interstitials before and after commercial breaks—for Cartoon Network. In one instance, Kelly turned these little pre-advertising bits into multi-part skits that could be edited together into a short film, like a _Scooby-Doo_ parody of _The Blair Witch Project_ that originally aired in mico-installments during a 1999 Halloween marathon.  Buddy in Buddy Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films Still, making a movie for movie theaters—one of the most traditional forms of mass entertainment—feels very overdue for Kelly. When _Too Many Cooks_ became a sensation, it opened up a lot of doors for him. He had already created two Adult Swim shows and written for many other cartoons when _Too Many Cooks_ came out, but it was the viral short that got him meetings. "_Too Many Cooks_ gave me a certain baseline of confidence that I never had," Kelly reflects. "You know, like in _Dungeons & Dragons,_ 'a +5 to confidence.'" He admits that he's kicking himself, a little bit, for not acting on that newfound confidence as much as he thinks he could have. "I wish I had done seven movies," he says. Making a movie was so important that he developed writer's block borne from anxiety. It was only when he was forced to finish a script for _Yule Log_ on a deadline that he overcame the block. Now he's made "three and a half" films, if you count a segment he made for the horror anthology film _V/H/S/Halloween_. Kelly hopes _Buddy_ is a containment-breaking success so that he can make more movies. But he doesn't want to think too much about where he fits into the future of horror cinema, which can be attributed in part to the fact that Kelly isn't just a horror filmmaker. _Buddy_, like _Too Many Cooks_ before it, is funny. "If you go to a haunted house, you hear a lot of screams,”Kelly says. “And then they laugh afterwards." He doesn't, however, approach _Buddy_ or anything else he makes from that horror/comedy binary. Though he's made a career out of works that explore the breakdown of reality, Kelly says he tries to approach things from a place of truth. "If this happened, what would happen next?" he asks. And with Kelly, sometimes the thing that happens next is a big friendly-looking unicorn going on a murderous rampage. 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