Casper Kelly Didn't Have Much Of A Pitch When He Brought His Yule Log Film To Adult Swim
It starts like any other yule log channel, with a warm fire filling the frame. A landlady interrupts the yuletide joy, her legs and vacuum shuffling past now and then. The doorbell rings; an elder woman with a Southern accent is there with her large adult son (dubbed "Pleatherface" at one point), claiming their car broke down, then forcing their way in. Later an unwitting couple returns to the home, unaware of the grisly death that went down moments before their arrival. All the good girls and boys watching become captive witness to hillbilly murder, haunted logs, a cult, aliens, and a night of laughs at a cozy cabin in the woods.
"Get in the holiday spirit with this cozy, crackling fire," reads the HBO Max page for Adult Swim's "Yule Log," the latest fever dream from Cheddar Goblin commercial creator Casper Kelly ("Too Many Cooks"). /Film's Matthew Bilodeau hails the hour-and-a-half long feature as one of the best horror films of the year, citing its layered mythologies and earnest callbacks to horror classics like Bryan Bertino's home invasion thriller "The Strangers." Watching it straddle so many subgenres, it's hard to imagine how Kelly conceived of the project.
Speaking with Bloody Disgusting, Kelly explains how the idea came his way a year ago, during the holidays:
"I was watching a yule log video and watching the tight shot of the fireplace. Then, for whatever reason, I saw this image of, what if you just saw legs walk past it in the foreground and then you started to hear dialogue? And I thought, what if you're in a yule log video, but suddenly there's a story that's also going on off-screen and you just get to see parts of it. That was the origin of it all. Then, I went to Adult Swim and really pitched that to them."
Trauma roasting on an open fire
From "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell" to livestream gaming send-up "Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough," Casper Kelly has always endeared himself to the ambitious and the offbeat. His talent has proven a golden egg for Cartoon Network's adult nighttime programming block, with episodic contributions from Kelly on animated Adult Swim series' "Squidbillies," "Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law," and "Aqua Teen Hunger Force."
Because Kelly's history with Adult Swim is filled with TV episodes and short films, "Yule Log" (also titled "The Fireplace") would be his first pitched feature film, and also Adult Swim's first live-action horror movie. Kelly goes on to confirm to Bloody Disgusting that he got approval to stretch his idea for length, but only after he agreed to do the movie for the same budget — a challenge not in finances, but in taffy-pulling the concept from a bizarre short into a coherent (as coherent as generational time-jumping can be) ninety-minute movie.
Kelly elaborates to /Film's Erin Brady:
"Oh man, I learned so much. I think with the Adult Swim stuff I do, which is usually 11 minutes, it's almost like a 'Three Stooges' cartoon. But here, you need to have some more meaning, ideally, and some character arcs and some character changes and be about something, like a thematic debate about something. I think that helps ... I mean, you don't have to do that, but I thought it would be good to have that."
Kelly further tells Erin that he's "got the bug," and has two projects in the works. Like his approach to "The Fireplace" the filmmaker has one foot in horror, the other in sci-fi; the rest is being kept under wraps for now, so keep your ears perked and eyes peeled, and keep those fires stoked for weird horror.