The Twisted Horror Comedy Buddy Will Make You Stop Believing in God

5 min readYou wake up, go to work, try to do right by your family and friends, and then along comes a movie like Buddy to dig a sinkhole beneath everything you know to be good and decent.H.P. Lovecraft once wrote that “no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace,” and that about sums up this homicidal parody of Barney-style afternoon kids’ TV. It is written and directed by Casper Kelly, the evil genius behind the viral video “Too Many Cooks,” which similarly took the format of a benign ’90s sitcom theme song and corrupted it into a spiraling free fall into existential dread.Buddy, which opens in theaters Friday, is utterly hilarious and cleverly constructed, and if it happens to leave you abandoned in a fathomless emotional abyss from which there is no escape…? It’s okay. You’ll be okay. Maybe. Walk it off, slugger.The film is about a TV show called It’s Buddy, which is basically Barney crossed with Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Instead of a big purple dinosaur, the main character is a big orange unicorn, and their uniform band of white teeth suggests they both go to the same mascot dentist. Buddy’s world is full of real kids, who cavort and play amid talking mailboxes, talking backpacks, talking couches, and a few grown-ups as the mailman and nurse. Nope, nothing wrong here.The character Buddy is voiced by Keegan-Michael Key with the singsong cadence of a harmless yokel who just wants love and to have a good time with the kids. But soon we see that if anyone disagrees with him or defies him in any way whatsoever, the nice-guy routine gives way to a ruthless, sociopathic control freak. Buddy’s oversize ego is outmatched only by its fragility, so although he plays the part of your everyday pal, he cannot—will not—abide anyone doing anything that contradicts his will.Hey, this guy sounds familiar in lots of ways! I’ll leave it to you to connect the dots about who this bloated, temperamental orange megalomaniac with yellow tufts of wispy hair might call to mind. We all probably know somebody who fits the bill. Buddy quickly shows us that he’s not just an extreme narcissist but also ruthless and murderous. If one of the kids turns defiant and suddenly disappears … well, hey, here’s another kid to take his place in the next episode!There’s something automatically amusing about a fluffy kids’ character with a mean streak. The contrast and contradiction tickle us, like a little kid who curses or a granny who raps. But Buddy goes even deeper into the depths than that. There’s also the cheap transgressiveness of horror flicks like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or the Mickey Mouse slasher The Mouse Trap, which derive their appeal (such as it is) from spilling blood all over a beloved children’s icon. But Buddy is more ambitious than that. The movie is also more bleak and frightening than Five Nights at Freddy’s, although it might have a hard time getting out of the shadow of that mega-popular franchise.When the filmmaker spoke with me and my cohost Eric Vespe on our Stephen King–themed podcast The Kingcast this week, he said Buddy originated when a producer asked him to devise ideas for a Barney horror film. “I was not sure about it at first, because mascot horror is a pretty established subgenre, and I feel like just the novelty of something cute with an ax is not enough,” Kelly said. “But then I started thinking about it more, and then I started figuring out new directions to take it and new things to do with it and hopefully to make it scary and funny but also give it some depth, give it real emotion. If the audience wants to, it’s about things that they can discuss afterward.”Roadside AttractionsBuddy is utterly hilarious, cleverly constructed, and creepy as hell. (See above.)So what are those things? I’d say Buddy is a horror film about denial. It’s the jump-scare version of the meme with the little dog in the burning house who smiles vacantly and says, “This is fine.” The kids and the grown-ups in the show know something is wrong, but acknowledging that is difficult and dangerous. Better to just keep smiling and whistle past any unpleasantness.Without giving away too much of the story: Cristin Milioti plays a nurse who starts to wake up. Is this candy-colored world actual reality? Are they trapped in some hellish circumstance that is merely dressed up as soft, cushy, and benign? What is the truth? And why doesn’t Buddy tolerate anyone asking these questions? That’s a good question itself.On The Kingcast, we talked with Kelly about Stephen King themes, naturally—finding common threads in The Shining, in which little Danny and his mom, Wendy, already knew that alcoholic dad Jack was bad news. Only after being trapped with him, far away from the rest of the world and possibly provoked by haunting hotel spirits, do they realize (too late) that, no, they’ve got to escape. Again, denial is the most powerful kind of possession there is.Kelly said he often compared Buddy to Jack Torrance. “That character is a mixture of scary, pathetic, absurd, funny, vulnerable, and empathetic in some ways. It’s all those in one,” he said. But there are also aspects of Annie Wilkes, the psychopathic nurse from Misery, in Buddy. You can see it both in their fathomless neediness and in the mask of folksy cheer that obscures both of their volcanic tempers. Remember her calling things “cock-a-doody” among other childish curse substitutes? “Also, nothing is her fault,” Kelly said, bringing up another parallel. “Everything is someone else’s fault.”The kid actors of Buddy deserve a shout-out, especially lead actress Delaney Quinn, who brings a sense of awareness that begins to wake up the other boys and girls. There are always Chicken Littles in our midst, who warn when the sky is falling. But they are often disregarded and dismissed.Credit should also go to the astounding voice performers, such as Patton Oswalt, who plays the helpfully chatty backpack Strappy, and Looney Tunes voice master Eric Bauza, who plays a mailbox, a wishing well, a sofa, a trash can, and someone called “Pee Flower.” (Best for the movie to give you that context.)Buddy is ultimately more funny than upsetting. It’s not real, after all. But beneath the happy, shiny surface is a warning: No all-powerful force for good is going to step in and save us.When things are bad, we know it. We don’t need a talking clock to warn us that it’s time. The voice inside is one we should heed.