Adult Swim Yule Log Quietly Became One Of 2022's Best Horror Films
This article contains major spoilers for "Adult Swim Yule Log."
In the age of streaming, the folks at Adult Swim are constantly proving the power of stumbling across a bizarre fever dream at 3:00 a.m. You wake up wondering if that commercial ("Unedited Footage of a Bear") about an ambiguous drug, which turns into a nightmarish spiral into the world of addiction, was something you hallucinated while in this dream state. Adult Swim is practically bred for surprises like that; it's one of the few reasons to actually hold onto your cable package.
Since 2009, the programming block has continually released bizarre shorts like these under the "Infomercial" banner, which allows its creatives to go wild and experiment. They're often released to channel viewers in the dead of night, with almost no marketing. However, a few of them slip through to the masses by means of viral success. Casper Kelly, the mind behind Adult Swim's "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell" and the Cheddar Goblin commercial from "Mandy," created an internet sensation back in 2014 with "Too Many Cooks." (Before you get mad at me for reminding you of that earworm, just know we're in this together.) If you'll remember, the short was a riff on the corny theme songs of '80s and '90s television sitcoms, which turned progressively darker as the titular tune became something uniquely sinister. You can't mass market something that strange. Adult Swim understands that sometimes you just need to go for broke, and it looks like they've not only done it again, but took the format to new heights.
If "Too Many Cooks" and "Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough" was Kelly stretching his legs, then the "Adult Swim Yule Log" is him breaking into a full-out sprint.
A stealth horror movie
Unlike the aforementioned shorts, "Adult Swim Yule Log" was marketed through a 15 second promo, which advertised a serene, cozy experience. From Disney+ to the folks at Shudder, the annual tradition of the Yule Log is nothing new. However, if you believed that Adult Swim would play it safe, then you haven't been paying attention. On the off chance you ignored the spoiler warning at the top and simply want to read spoilers anyway, I implore you to go check this out before reading any further.
For the first few minutes, "Adult Swim Yule Log" starts off exactly as you'd think. The crackling fire envelopes the screen as if it were a warm blanket. As the camera fixates on the fireplace, a pair of legs belonging to a cleaning woman (Megan Hayes) walk by. She's abruptly murdered off screen by a pair of hillbilly psychopaths who come knocking at the cabin door. They hear a car pull up, prompting them to quickly clean up the mess, hide the body, and wait in another room.
The camera eventually zooms out to reveal that Alex (Justin Miles) and Zoe (Andrea Laing), an interracial couple, have booked the cabin for a romantic getaway, with Alex filming the fireplace for his moderately successful YouTube channel. They talk about proposals, bear-skinned rugs, and their own insecurities. There's an occasional rack focus on a champagne bucket in the foreground that shows the masked killer ominously peeping his head out to observe the couple from time to time. If you hadn't already guessed you were in the hands of a stealth horror film, then the next 80 minutes seeks to test what the genre could be if all of the rules were thrown out the window.
A real genre bender
The camera stays completely still for well over 30 minutes, which kept me on edge for what could possibly come next. The hillbillies are set up as the primary antagonists, so you think you have an idea of where this could go, but instead, Kelly literally hurls us into the fireplace. Where once we were watching a stage play of sorts between a couple on the rocks and a group of stoner friends who also show up, we are suddenly transported to the POV of a killer sentient log that brutally murders someone in the shower to bloody pulp.
In a year that featured one horror sensation ("Pearl") after another ("Terrifier 2"), "Adult Swim Yule Log," otherwise known as "The Fire Place," stands out as a shining example of how genre ingenuity can pop up in the most unlikely of places. You'd think a film that attempts to tackle as many sub-genres as this one may have bitten off more than it can chew. It isn't as tightly wound as something like "Barbarian" (with which this would make an insane double feature), but Kelly is so attuned to subverting every expectation with gleeful abandon that you can't help but get wrapped up in the madness.
"Adult Swim Yule Log" evokes a number of horror films, including but not limited to "The Cabin in the Woods," "Rubber," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," "The Strangers," and "Friday the 13th" — and that's just scratching the surface. Characters walk in and out of frame to talk about a murder that transpired in the area decades earlier. Why have one mythology when you can have all of them?
'This is fine'
There comes a point where the surrealist's touch in "Adult Swim Yule Log" is undeniable. In possibly the standout sequence of the film, the very intoxicated Henry (Skye Passmore) sees a little man in the fireplace (Charles Green) inviting him to join him on the other side. When Henry passes through, he wakes up in what I can only describe as if the Black Lodge from "Twin Peaks" was under the control of Willy Wonka.
Just as you're trying to find your footing in the flaming hellscape, the man starts talking about how this is "just like that meme." Green invites Henry into an interdimensional elevator, which can seemingly see into any fireplace in the world, and brings him to a time where his mother is still pregnant. Henry is instructed to write a note on the fridge, which will make him grow up to become a success. But after delivering the note and returning to the elevator, the man reveals that he's tricked Henry into brutally murdering his mother with a knife that he thought was a magic marker. "I would love to argue with you, but I don't debate with people that don't exist," the man says, before the stoner disappears from reality. The film continues, but another actor (Thy Bui) has replaced him with no one else noticing the change.
At this point, we've become incredibly far removed from the movie we thought we were watching. It plays as if the Lady in the Radiator from "Eraserhead" got her own holiday special. It's sick, demented, and hysterical. Kelly has single-handedly demolished the movie, and it's all the better for it.
Rage throughout time and space
You could spend a great deal of time talking about how "Adult Swim Yule Log" is a crazy, cuckoo rollercoaster that operates on dream logic, but oddly enough, there is a thematic throughline. The film will occasionally offer glimpses of the same location throughout history, whether it be some children from the '50s playing cowboy, or a woman with suicidal ideations listening to some tunes in the living room. But none of those segments are as instrumental as the one which explains why the yule log has sprung to life and begun murdering the inhabitants of the cabin.
The log is possessed by the rage of Rosa (Jessica Fontaine), a Black woman from the Civil War era whose son was sold to a slaver known for his brutality. At first, all you hear is the log screaming "arson" when it attacks the bunch at the cabin. But as we get more of Rosa's story, we realize that it's actually been saying "our son," the last words her captor ever heard as she buried a knife into his neck.
Beyond the genres collapsing in on one another, "Adult Swim Yule Log" fixates on the pain of time, as rules, cultural attitudes, and cruelty changes from decade to decade. Even the little man in the fireplace bemoans how people in the future will look at what we're doing now with scorn and judgment. The agony of past aggressions can never truly die. They only manifest themselves in other ways. A sentient killer log is hilarious at first glance (especially when it gets trapped in a closet), but the realization that it carries the lasting anguish of an enslaved woman makes the horror much more human.
A very successful television experiment
I've barely scratched the surface of the complexity that "Adult Swim Yule Log" entails, as I didn't even mention the organ-sucking aliens, the unexplored cult, and how much this special has effectively ruined the mere sight of pimento cheese forever. (Also, the inbred hillbilly slasher played by Brendan Patrick Connor is hilariously named Pleatherface.)
I love that a traditional yule log gag from the folks at Adult Swim delivered a deliciously unpredictable spin on their WTF-inspired history, all while transcending what the channel is capable of producing. (This thing is a full-length feature film!) It surprises on almost every level, especially for something that initially aired at 11:30pm with minimal marketing. The success of "Too Many Cooks" proves there is such room for artists like Kelly to create meta avant-garde projects like this. These are the kind of experiments worth investing in.
In an exclusive interview with /Film's Erin Brady, Kelly talked about how he not only had a wonderful time making a horror movie, but has two more top secret film projects in development. Hopefully they're as strange, funny, and as ingenuous as "Adult Swim Yule Log," because Kelly is quickly becoming one of the most exciting new voices in the world of horror.
"Adult Swim Yule Log" is currently streaming on HBO Max.