Interviews
How Casper Kelly’s Experimental Yule Log Project Turned into Adult Swim’s First Horror Feature [Interview]
Casper Kelly opens up on how his stealth holiday horror movie came together, its curious development, and the importance of keeping audiences surprised.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to genuinely surprise audiences during a digital age where entire scripts can leak before a movie even exits pre-production. Horror is a genre that thrives through the unknown and its ability to make its audience uncomfortable and unsure of what they’re about to experience. A true surprise is easier said than done, even when there’s a strong plan behind it, but Casper Kelly’s The Fireplace (also known as Adult Swim Yule Log) manages to accomplish this rare feat (read my review here).
Casper Kelly is a challenging avant-garde filmmaker whose cut his teeth on Adult Swim series like Stroker and Hoop and Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, but he’s perhaps better-known for his stylistically ambitious “infomercials,” Too Many Cooks and Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough.
Kelly has returned with his most ambitious project yet, Adult Swim’s first live-action feature film that doubles as a stealth yule log video. The Fireplace is a radical piece of experimental filmmaking that’s likely to resonate with both horror fans and the Adult Swim crowd, as well as stand out as a new holiday classic. Kelly’s The Fireplace continues the director’s trend of disruptive, unpredictable filmmaking, but the genesis of this horror movie is far from conventional.
Hot off of the release of his first feature, Casper Kelly gets candid on how The Fireplace grew from a seasonal experiment into Adult Swim’s full-on live-action feature, his passion for subverting stylistic restrictions, and how Room 237’s Rodney Ascher helped inspire one of the movie’s most effective scares.
Bloody Disgusting: What was the initial impetus for this bold project?
Casper Kelly: It was an idea that came to me last year 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. That’s the premise and do you buy off on this premise? I have no idea what happens after that, but do you buy off on that? And they did.
Now, normally I make shorter things, but I decided to ask if we could try making it a movie. Adult Swim hadn’t made a live-action horror movie before but they said okay if I could do it for basically the same budget. I said, let’s see what we can do!
BD: Had you pitched longer stuff before to Adult Swim and had you been looking to take on a bigger project of this nature?
Kelly: I had been looking to do a feature for a long time. It’s really been a bucket list dream and I’m a late bloomer in that department. Now that I’ve done it, I can’t wait to do more. I’ve pitched to other places, but I’ve never pitched a feature to Adult Swim before because it’s really not in the realm of what they do. For whatever reason, on this idea I just tried it and I thought that if I make it cheaply enough then they might go for it, which they did.
BD: Was the initial aim with this movie to stylistically push boundaries in the same ways as Too Many Cooks and Final Deployment 4? Is that the space that you like to play in most?
Kelly: That’s a great question and I’m honestly not 100% sure. I’m pretty sure that I have other gears and other styles that I want to explore, but I just felt that for my first movie–I just love layering in and combining things–so why not try to do it on this? However, I’ll find myself writing other scripts and consider adding those same types of ideas, so maybe it is my style. I don’t know yet! We’ll see.
BD: In that sense, when constructing this, did you intentionally try to play into the mystery angle where the audience doesn’t know what’s ahead and that this is going to be anything at all, let alone a horror movie?
Kelly: Yes, in fact early on we were leaning more in the direction that we don’t tilt at all that it’s a movie and we actually have an hour of innocent fireplace footage at the start and you wouldn’t even know what you’re dealing with unless you happened to look over and notice it happening in the background. Then you would tell people and they’d inevitably fast-forward past that first hour to get to the content. We thought that might be too much, so we decided on a few minutes, which feels like an eternity. Immediately, when I got the idea I thought that’d be a fun sneak attack approach. In this world where everybody knows so much in advance, it’s a nice thing to be able to do.
BD: There’s a real serious stylistic turn that happens after the 30-minute mark where the film drops the stationary angle and becomes a more conventionally-filmed movie. Did you ever consider trying to keep the entire movie in this simple setup?
Kelly: I did originally consider–almost like a radio play–if I could do it all in that initial stationary setup. Even with Too Many Cooks there was a time when I was going to do it all with sitcoms, but it was fun to eventually veer into different genres. So I decided to do the same thing here.
BD: There’s some really exceptional cinematography here, especially during the film’s first half-hour. That rack focus reveal in the ice bucket is fantastic. Was it difficult to properly block and plan out certain shots during that portion of the movie?
Kelly: Yes, there were many difficulties. Also, the director of Room 237, Rodney Ascher, is a friend of mine. I gave him the script to read and in my original version it was a wine glass that reflected the killer. It was his idea to make it an ice bucket or champagne bucket, which is just so much more reflective. A wine glass probably wouldn’t have even worked, so I’m very grateful to him for that.
BD: Another creative flourish throughout the movie are these flashback transitions. How did those come together and were they always an element of the story?
Kelly: Yes, it started out like a puzzle and figuring out what can and can’t be done. If you’re telling a story where you’re not allowed to move the camera, then what can you do? You can do reflections, and you can also travel through time. That doesn’t count as moving the camera. Cinema is such a voyeuristic medium, but I’m also just genuinely interested in things like what else has gone down in my house, which has been around since the 1960s. What happened in this room that I’m in? What happened in my yard before houses were here? It was interesting to consider how those things influence us, even when we don’t realize it. It just makes you think of what else has transpired exactly where you are, right now.
BD: This film touches on a lot of different subjects, but I appreciated that there’s some commentary on colonialism and the horror that this country is built upon. Why did you want to work that into the narrative to some extent?
Kelly: I’m just very interested in all of that. When I wrote it, it was tough and a gambit if all of that would fit tonally with the rest of the movie. I decided just to go for it. I’m interested in that million dollar question that if I lived during any horrific time period in history would I have been a good person or not? Then there’s the question of how I think that I’m a good person by today’s modern standards, but in the future will they view me as a terrible person because I drove a car that polluted the environment and other modern habits that would then be seen as awful. I thought that was an interesting question to explore in this.
BD: All of the casting here is from Atlanta. Was there a certain aesthetic that you were looking for with these actors?
Kelly: I think I like the indie movie feeling of it. We were also shooting in order, so I didn’t want to be stuck in a situation where we had an actor who only had a day of availability and we had to shoot all of their stuff at once. That would kind of mess things up. I just love the pool of talent in Atlanta. Other people have told me that with a found-footage movie that it works in the film’s favor if there’s a cast that the audience doesn’t immediately recognize. A well-known cast of actors can even pull the audience out of the experience, sometimes.
BD: You mentioned showing your script to Rodney Ascher, but who are some of your influences in the horror genre, both in general and for this specific project?
Kelly: I don’t really watch movies for reference, but I’ve just seen so much stuff that when the plant grows there are so many minerals of other movies in the soil that give that plant life. I haven’t thought about these things consciously, but there’s definitely influences baked in there. Certainly David Lynch. There are all the usual suspects like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is such a gorgeous movie. Then more recent stuff like neon horror and Mandy. Those were the biggest ones. People have mentioned to me that it has a Sam Raimi vibe, which I didn’t think of, but of course.
BD: David Lynch’s style definitely felt in play during all of the tiny fire man time travel material. Rubber, Quentin Dupieux’s killer tire movie, definitely came to mind! Off of that, talk about the whole killer log angle and why it ultimately felt like the right place to take the movie in its final act.
Kelly: I don’t know, it just felt like the intuitive, right direction for everything. You’ve been watching this log the entire time, so to suddenly make it a character seemed interesting to me. And it has a story! There’s a reason that it’s doing this, how, and there’s meaning to it all.
BD: It’s definitely the right final stage for a horror film that begins as a yule log video. In addition to this killer log, the movie includes backwoods serial killers and aliens. How did you decide on all of these tropes to mix together and is there anything that didn’t make the cut?
Kelly: First of all, I had to write this very fast on an extremely tight schedule. I think that everything I wanted is pretty much in there. With the aliens there was some level of me considering if I should add them or not. I decided to just throw everything that I wanted into the first draft and see what works and what doesn’t. Then people seemed to like it all, so we didn’t get rid of any of it.
BD: It’s all foreshadowed very well.
Kelly: Good!
BD: You mentioned needing to shoot this on a very tight schedule, but when did you actually shoot it and put it together? Were you sitting on this for long or out of the pandemic?
Kelly: I had the idea during the holidays of last year and they were able to fund it and have a deal in place by the middle of this year. We made it within six months, all total. So it was very, very fast. Way faster than Too Many Cooks, for example. I spent a year, on and off, editing around and playing with that. Here I didn’t have that luxury. For color correction you normally have a few days, but here we had one day. I didn’t have any time to second-guess myself. We also had six editors editing different sections. There wasn’t enough time for just one editor to take on the project.
BD: You mentioned that you already have more feature film plans on the way. Are you hoping to do more horror movies? What types of stories do you want to tell?
Kelly: I have a few in the works and one is definitely a horror movie. One, which I can’t talk about, is sort of an animated family thing. And then, for myself, I’m writing a science fiction thing. I’m excited. I was a late bloomer to directing, so now I’m trying to make up for lost time!
‘Adult Swim Yule Log’ (The Fireplace) is now available to stream on HBO Max.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
You must be logged in to post a comment.