Buddy Crossed a Line: Children's TV Never Recovers
Kelly made "Too Many Cooks" in 2014, which means he has spent over a decade perfecting the art of the long-form dread that hides behind a cheerful format.
There is a specific kind of horror that works not because it shows you a monster but because it shows you something you already trusted, and then slowly, methodically, turns it inside out. *Buddy* — Casper Kelly's feature debut, now on its way to becoming Roadside Attractions' first post-COVID film to clear twenty million dollars at the box office — does exactly that. It takes children's television, that warm and primary-coloured world you handed your entire nervous system to at age four, and asks what was actually happening on the other side of the camera.
Kelly made "Too Many Cooks" in 2014, which means he has spent over a decade perfecting the art of the long-form dread that hides behind a cheerful format. *Buddy* is that instinct stretched to a feature, and the result is something that should not work as well as it does. Horror films built around beloved IP or familiar archetypes usually collapse under the weight of their own concept. This one doesn't. It commits to the architecture.
While *Buddy* is quietly becoming the sleeper hit nobody predicted, Netflix is running a September slate heavy enough to keep you indoors: *The Gentlemen* returns, *Monster* continues its particular brand of chaos, and there is a *Practical Magic* sequel arriving soon enough that Decider has already published a guide to rewatching the first film, which tells you exactly where the cultural appetite currently sits — comfort, witches, Sandra Bullock. There is something very 2026 about that.
Elsewhere, Prime Video's *Dirty* is assembling a cast that should not be possible for a U.K. crime thriller: Samantha Morton, Phoebe Dynevor, and now Toby Kebbell, with Matt Charman — who wrote *Bridge of Spies* — at the helm. That is three people who have no business being in the same series together, which means either the script is extraordinary or someone called in every favour they had. Either way, it goes on the list.
And then there is Ellen Burstyn at ninety-three, still working, still taking roles in films like Kornél Mundruczó's *Place to Be* opposite Taika Waititi and, apparently, a pigeon — which is the kind of sentence that makes you want to watch something immediately and ask questions later.
The verdict on *Buddy*: horror figured out something the rest of cinema keeps forgetting. The scariest thing was never the dark. It was the thing you let in because it smiled at you.
