Casper Kelly Reveals the Surprising Reason Buddy Had to Look Warm and Cuddly
And the classic film Kelly deliberately homaged in the movie.
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Casper Kelly's Buddy is the horror movie millennials didn't know they needed. Kelly, the man behind the viral sensations Too Many Cooks and Hulu's Yule Log, crafts a dark and terrifying story about kids show character Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) who goes rogue and starts murdering the kids on his series. Of course, considering Kelly's previous works, things take even stranger turns from there and the entire thing is all sorts of gory fun.
Kelly, a Gen Xer, understands the allure of drawing horror from '90s nostalgia. "I like genres or types of media that have certain rules in their stories because that allows me to break them and also hopefully it can be used as metaphors and parables about larger things," Kelly tells The Film Maven. "It's hard to explain why you're attracted to things, you know? You're just into certain things. It's a mystery."
Kids today look back on '90s television and see something that feels bizarre and unsettling. From Pee-Wee's Playhouse to Barney, the pastel colors and anthropomorphic animals definitely have an unsettling quality today, and that's what Kelly wanted to replicate with the set design of Buddy's show. "From the top down I worked with a lot of great people," says Kelly, who praises production designer Anna Kathleen for her remarkable ability to replicate the right shades of teal and orange for the fictional show everyone inhabits.
"The main directive was it cannot be a spoof or parodistic," he says. "It has to feel like a show played straight. A show that came out in that time period and played as truthfully as possible. Then the comedy and the horror can come naturally from the events." Though there were several reference points for Buddy and his kid's show, Kelly didn't want to have viewers immediately compare it to shows that did actually exist. "I wouldn't say it's a parody. I wanted it to feel like Barney came out and that's successful, and some other company came out with their sort of knockoff."
That extended to the creation of Buddy as well. A bright orange unicorn/dragon hybrid, Buddy may draw comparisons to Barney, but he's anything but. For Kelly and crew, there was a thin needle to thread between making the character charming and terrifying. "A couple of days before shooting, because it was very to the wire, they had put in eyes for Buddy [where] the pupils were very small and there was white all around his eyes, so it made him look crazy," Kelly said. "The idea there was, which I get, the puppeteers were like, 'He's gonna act crazy. You want him to look crazy and scary,' and I'm like, 'Absolutely not.' He has to look warm and cuddly and when he starts doing crazy things the audience will put that personality on his face."
He compares it not unlike to Michael Meyers in Halloween. The mask that that character wears, on its own, isn't particularly scary. (It was a take on a William Shatner mask, after all.) But once the actor puts the mask on, coupled with the atmosphere and everything else, it becomes the key feature to scare the pants off everyone. "Through his body language and everything you can feel what he's feeling," says Kelly. "I have to give Anna Kathleen a lot of the credit for the color palette and a lot of thinking there. She was even heavily involved, even though it wasn't her department, in the color palette of the puppets, figuring out what color Buddy would be."
Kristen Lopez
Buddy's voice was also an opportunity to do something different. Kelly cites comedian Joe Perez as an influence on finding a voice performer as he knew he wanted someone known for a persona that was so different for the character. "Or like Tom Hanks," he says. "It's fun to kind of do something in that direction where they're playing against their type." In this case, Key, who'd done work on both the sketch comedy show Key and Peele as well as voicing a character for the Toy Story franchise, was the first person they went out.
When Kelly's 2014 short film Too Many Cooks dropped on YouTube, people were inundated with the ear worm that was that short's theme song. Buddy is no different, with the character having a song for nearly every situation. "I worked with, for those songs, Sean Coleman, who also co-wrote Too Many Cooks," he said. "I think he's just a natural at writing songs in a lot of different styles." The duo realized that, for Barney at least, most of the songs crafted for that series were takes on public domain songs like "Yankee Doodle."
"I did it more like that, and Tracy [Rosenblum], one of the producers, wisely was like, 'We're hearing that song so much. Why don't you make it more of an earworm, more catchy?' I'm like, 'You know what? You're right.' So, we went back to the drawing board and I listened to the the ten most catchy theme theme songs from kids shows of the '90s and did some thinking about that, and then we came up with something new." Kelly definitely loves anyone who has the songs stuck in their head (like I have for the last week).
For a movie filled with puppets and kids (and bikes that move on their own), Kelly says there was certainly a struggle navigating everyone's different needs. On top of that, the movie also has a secondary plot involving Cristin Milioti's Grace. There were initially questions as to whether her story would be intercut with the Buddy narrative or not. "There was discussions about it," says Kelly. "And we did experiment with intercutting those two long sections. Some of the producers had also done Barbarian so they were used to a pivot that takes a while to see how it connects. They were they were not as averse to it, which is good because I liked not intercutting it. I liked almost feeling trapped in a certain world. As long as I can hold on to him, trapped in a certain world and almost claustrophobic, and then a little bit of release as we shift to another world."
There is one specific shot that Kelly is proud of, and that classic film fans will definitely want to be on the lookout for. As the children try to flee from Buddy, he's filmed cast against a black night sky. For those who have seen Charles Laughton's 1955 film Night of the Hunter, there's a scene that looks similar and that's intentional here. "That's a definite reference," says Kelly. "I was writing them on the run and I always loved that shot. I'm like, 'It would be so fun to do an homage to that sequence.' That made me realize Night of the Hunter is one of the best kids on the run, in peril, movies there is so I had to rewatch that and think about that."
Buddy is in theaters Friday.
