An Appreciation of Casper Kelly
Thoughts on films like 'Too Many Cooks' and the 'Adult Swim Yule Logs'.
Spoilers for both Adult Swim Yule Log films here, check them out before you read.
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In the classic Adult Swim short "Too Many Cooks", a cheerful television opening sequence goes wildly wrong until it warps and mutates into something horrific. The Adult Swim Yule Log does essentially the same to the cozy "yule log" genre. Behind these films is writer/director Casper Kelly
The aesthetics and tones of Kelly's work distinctly fits the Adult Swim style: erratic, random, and while many of the most horrific moments are darkly funny, even the silliest moment has an undercurrent of horror and existential dread. Kelly's films are such hypnotic absurdity that the viewer begins to doubt their own sanity, like Nicolas Cage watching the Cheddar Goblin commercial (written and directed by Kelly) in Panos Cosmatos' Mandy (2018).
"Too Many Cooks" (2014) begins as a normal, if exaggerated, opening sequence akin to something like Full House, but the titles on and on to a comical degree, until the show begins to change and cycle through genres, and eventually the whole endeavor is stalked by a blade-wielding maniac. The film is an overlap of title (the kind for which the "skip intro" button was invented) and narrative (a killer on the loose). In the end, the show, what little is left of it, has been obliterated by its own opening titles.
The Adult Swim Yule Log (2022) also begins as one would expect: a crackling fireplace with the light tinkling of Christmas music. Slowly the larger picture begins to emerge, however, and it becomes a horror film filled with various tropes: a sadistic backwoods mother/son duo; a pagan cult; an alien invader; a group of carefree young adults lined up for slaughter; a traumatic history of violence; and, um, a sentient flying killer log. The sheer volume of monstrous threats feels comically overwhelming, and some of the monsters wind up killing other monsters rather than the cast of desperate survivors. It's all a bizarre bloodbath. Like "Too Many Cooks", the Yule Log is a case of comfort media taken over by horror.
Then this year saw the release of the Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin' Out, in which Casper Kelly expands on the first film while simultaneously playing with the expectations of just what a sequel to the first Yule Log might be. In the sequel, Zoe (who miraculously survived the first film) tries to escape her trauma and the possibility of another attack by fleeing town, and winds up squarely in the middle of a Hallmark movie.
When traveling to a resort with her Gay Best Friend, a car breakdown forces them into the small town of Mistletoe (a town "known for its clumsy hunks", leading to a half-dozen or so meet-cute collisions). There, Zoe meets a cheesy cast of Christmasy characters and finds herself quickly adopted into a family, maybe even slowly beginning to let her guard down as she falls for the owner of a Christmas ornament store. In an inversion of Kelly's typical formula, here a horror genre is taken over by comfortable cinematic junk food.
As with most of Kelly's films, the conflict between genres comes to the fore in a violent fashion. At times there are even two genres within the same frame as Zoe struggles to escape the horror movie and embrace the Hallmark movie. The friction between genres comes down everything from music and lighting to aspect ratio, and in the film's climax, the genre shifts moment to moment as Christmas festival-goers are attacked. The two genres are at war, and the film's ending promises the conflict isn't over.
It's to Kelly's credit that so much of the Yule Log sequel feels like a true Hallmark movie: never too far removed from parody, but nonetheless you can almost sense an actual Hallmark movie hiding inside this horror movie and trying to get out. For his part, Kelly said in an interview with Bloody Disgusting that he "did get emotionally involved with" a Hallmark movie he had watched. "I had cognitive dissonance where I sort of didn't admire these movies, but I got emotionally involved in them and enjoyed them. They made me feel good." It's not hard to imagine the conflict between a more surreal horror and a comfy Hallmark movie playing out in Kelly's own head.
The short "Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough" (2018), co-written/directed by Kelly, begins as a videogame walkthrough stream that escalates into a series of nested streams that eventually folds back on itself until it implodes. Kelly's work can be summed up by a scene when the nested streams are looped, like Charles Foster Kane walking past the mirrored hallway: a glimpse of infinity that's as horrific as it is strangely beautiful.