How Adult Swim’s ‘Too Many Cooks’ Set The Stage For 2026’s Strangest Scary Movie
Buddy (2026) is one of the scariest movies of the year, which shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks (2014). The surreal comedy short, directed and written by Casper Kelly, was released on Adult Swim and quickly became a surreal viral hit. While it’s very different from Buddy thematically and plot-wise, both stories focus on the corruption of television as a medium, allowing something monstrous to slip in through the cracks between fiction and reality.
In the years since Too Many Cooks, Kelly has become increasingly ambitious with his filmmaking, with even his segment in something like V/H/S: Halloween (2025) showcasing a willingness to mess with expectations for the sake of gallows humor and surreal scares. Buddy probably doesn’t come into being without Too Many Cooks highlighting how effective that tonal fusion can be. If you love one, then you have to see the other.
We Wouldn’t Have ‘Buddy’ Without ‘Too Many Cooks’
Buddy shares a lot of creative DNA with Casper Kelly’s Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, a horrifying piece of absurdist comedy that plays with some of the same meta-textual elements. Both shorts pull heavily from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s TV culture, whether that be the standard sitcom tropes that Too Many Cooks is referencing or the deconstruction of shows like Barney & Friends (1992). Similar to Buddy, Too Many Cooks initially sets itself up as a baseline parody, poking fun at sitcom openings by revealing the sheer scale of the cast. However, a mysterious killer also begins stalking the opening credits, killing the characters even as they are introduced. This turns the short into pure horror, especially as it begins hopping into other genres and reimagines the sitcom tropes as a viral infection that can destroy lives.
It’s creepy, strange, and hilarious—which also sums up Buddy pretty well. The viral success of Too Many Cooks after it debuted led to directors like Rian Johnson singing its praises, further elevating Casper’s standing in the industry and lining up his spiritual successors to the short, Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough and Buddy. Too Many Cooks highlighted the surreal scares that can be mined from standard elements of classic television, tweaking the characters and situations just enough to make them deeply unsettling. Too Many Cooks walked so that Buddy could run, taking that general tone and leaning hard into it to great effect.
‘Buddy’ Turns Classic Kids TV into a Surreal and Scary Story
Buddy is all about reshaping the mascot-friendly era of children’s television, taking the characters in a far more harrowing direction than most iterations would allow. On a surface level, seeing a Barney-esque character murder the other characters of his show is a pretty brutal gag about the manufactured innocence of those shows, with even the children being picked off by the titular monster. However, it’s more than just that layer that makes Buddy so memorably scary.
The real scare comes when Freddy is able to evade Buddy and finds herself in a control room that seems to exist in a plane of reality removed from the material world. It is here that people can reach through TVs and drag people into this new artificial existence, with the many TV screens highlighting how children seem to be a primary target. The idea that a child could be kidnapped is scary enough, but the ensuing amnesia that people experience when that person is gone from their world only makes it creepier. It makes being on TV an act of horror, where you lose yourself to the character you play. It suggests there is some force moving outside of the boundaries of existence, looking to take people and trap them within it. It’s very creepy and makes the very concept of a television as a window into other worlds all the more unsettling.
‘Buddy’ Is Another One Of 2026’s Great Horror Recontextualizations
2026 has been a great year for horror, especially films that deconstruct other ideas or reimagine them for a modern space. Buddy is a good example of that, taking the idea of a character like Buddy and transforming him not just into a murderous monster but into a riff on abusive stars in the entertainment industry. Movies like It Ends (2026) take the friendship road trip and make it an endless nightmare, while Obsession (2026) uses the classic story of the Monkey’s Paw to transform a rom-com into a horror story.
Even Backrooms (2026) is fundamentally about taking a sense of natural exploration and the benign halls of middle America and transforming them into an endless maze full of terrors. Buddy might be the most overt (and silly) of the films, but the movie benefits greatly from a willingness to play with the very foundations of the medium. A TV studio becomes a place of nightmares just as easily as a colorful kids' show can become a bloodbath. All of it speaks to Casper Kelly’s subversive traits as a filmmaker that he codified with Too Many Cooks.
