To say that 2026 has been the year of the internet-to-movies pipeline feels like an understatement. While there had certainly been ‘content creators’ (an awful turn of phrase if ever there was one, but it's what everyone seems to have mutually agreed is the ideal term, so it’s here) who had made the jump to mainstream media before, their success was much more varied. YouTube critic Chris Stuckmann made the leap in 2024 with his Mike Flanagan-produced horror film Shelby Oaks; Markiplier made the leap in 2025 with his self-financed and self-distributed breakout Iron Lung, but it was the one-two punch of Obsession and Backrooms earlier this year that seemed to well and truly eradicate any negative connotation that came with such a leap in mediums.
Obsession was written and directed by Curry Barker, a content creator who made comedic shorts and skits across multiple platforms, and Backrooms was co-written and directed by Kane Parsons, who had been making Backrooms-related short films on YouTube for years. In completely unexpected fashion, these two small-budget horror films became some of the biggest pop-cultural phenomena of the year, and now a new addition to this pipeline is releasing, in the form of Casper Kelly’s Buddy.
Casper Kelly’s origins are a bit different from Barker or Parson’s, but he still very much got his start and gained a lot of traction in online spaces. Kelly actually got his start in television, writing for animated projects such as CatDog, The Scooby-Doo Project, and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. By 2014, he was regularly creating short film projects for Adult Swim, under the umbrella term of Infomercials. During this time, he made a short film titled Too Many Cooks, which would come to define his early career in many ways.
Too Many Cooks was a delirious blend of dark humor and horror and was very much designed to take casual viewers of the network’s late-night programming by surprise. The project ultimately proved very successful in this regard and went on to become a viral staple online in the years that followed. Though his roots were in television and even Too Many Cooks originally aired on television, it was this newfound internet-fueled success that truly launched Casper Kelly as a name in his own right.
In the year since then, Kelly has continued creating off-kilter blends of comedy and horror, such as Adult Swim Yule Log, the Cheddar Goblin scene from Mandy, and the “Fun Size” segment from V/H/S/Halloween. But now, he’s making the full-fledged leap to writing and directing his own theatrically released feature with Buddy. The film leans into Kelly’s penchant for blurring genre lines and looks to also explore his gifts for recreating children-oriented ‘90s aesthetics with VHS-indebted fuzz. The marketing for Buddy has prominently advertised it as ‘from the maker of Too Many Cooks,’ hyping up the film’s internet-to-movie trajectory. The question is, will it work?
Early buzz on Buddy seems to be quite positive, and while there isn’t exactly a huge amount of audience anticipation surrounding its release this weekend, there wasn’t initially for Obsession either. In true old-school fashion, that film’s audience grew from week-to-week as word spread about it through viral clips and reactions, and given Kelly’s own history with viral success, there’s every chance that Buddy could follow a similar trajectory.
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