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.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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