Culture
Now Playing: ‘Buddy’ is a bizarre blend of horror and kids’ TV
By: Gordon Briggs
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Growing up, I always felt there was something a little creepy about children’s shows. I don’t know if it was the talking inanimate objects of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, or the incessant cheeriness of something like Barney.
They feature giant, hyper-enthusiastic behavior and a sensory-heavy environment that unnaturally mimics the real world. Perhaps that’s the fear that the new movie Buddy taps into. It’s a surprisingly effective horror film set entirely inside a children’s show.
Taking the form of an episode of a fictional retro children’s program like Barney & Friends or Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, here, we follow a group of amnesiac children trapped inside a surreal, ’90s-style educational television show called It’s Buddy!, hosted by a giant, bright-orange humanoid unicorn voiced by Keegan-Michael Key.
Because many popular children’s entertainment figures have entered the public domain, we’ve been inundated with disposable slasher films. Whether it is the new R-rated Winnie-the-Pooh slasher Blood and Honey, the evil knife-carrying Mickey Mouse-inspired killer in Screamboat, or the movie that turned the ’60s variety show band The Banana Splits into axe-welding boogeymen, many recent horror movies have transformed innocent pop culture from our childhoods into bankable horror IP. However, in those films, the monster enters our world. Buddy actually pulls us into his world.
Plus, I like the horror of this movie. It doesn’t just revolve around bloodshed, but around a much more relatable terror: forced happiness. The film uses bright colors, catchy songs, and smiling characters to mask deep trauma and violence, requiring children to act happy no matter what.
This makes our boogeyman into something more than just a joke. He’s a genuinely disturbing patriarchal figure who comes off like a demented kidnapper rather than the powerful supernatural figures we see in most horror films, like Pennywise the clown from It. Specifically, seeing Buddy, a giant orange unicorn mascot, act as a loving friend, making his sudden shifts into an authoritarian killer deeply unsettling.
If there is a gripe, it’s that Children’s TV feels like an easy target. To put it another way, sometimes the movie can lean too heavily on irony, so it could be easy to dismiss this entire movie as a grown-up making fun of children’s TV, lending this movie a power that it doesn’t have. Still, I find this movie to be an effective and unusual horror film that uses its premise to satirize our nostalgia for a supposedly “simpler time”.★★★