Buddy / Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: A Double Feature

Last night I caught a screening of Buddy, the new film from Casper Kelly, about whom I've written before. Kelly is the mind behind the classic golden-age Adult Swim short "Too Many Cooks", as well as the two Adult Swim Yule Log films. Buddy fits right in.

In the film, Buddy the orange unicorn (an obvious homage to Barney the purple dinosaur) oversees an idyllic yet hermetic children's show kingdom. The children live in harmony with a costumed rabbit and other random adults (a mailman and a nurse). All the appliances and fixtures talk, and any kids' show problem can be solved with a song and a glib moral. Everything seems to be fine until one of the children refuses to participate, and Buddy turns evil.

But then, in the end, the entire endeavor is a facade, hiding the twisted reality of Buddy and a series of kidnapped children and adults. Several children mount an escape as Buddy becomes dangerous and the facade becomes untenable. Eventually, one young girl escapes, only to find the real world a vastly different place than the one she's known.

Where Buddy takes on the children's show and its accompanying stagnation, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (from I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun) centers itself on the camp slasher. Kris is an on-the-rise director who has been given the reins to a dormant horror franchise called Camp Miasma. When Kris gets a meeting with the original film's star and final girl, Billy, she enters into a turbulent psychosexual experience with the older woman that involves embracing fear and violent death as a symbol of ecstatic release.

What really unites these two new releases is the slippage between reality and fantasy, fantasy in this case being polar opposites: the cheerfully isolated utopian world of a children's show, and the grim dystopia of murder and mayhem we visit almost masochistically.

The trick is that each film is its own twisted mirror, and therefore each film is a reflection of the other. For the children of the titular series It's Buddy, the bright and happy show turns out to be an illusion covering up a wicked hellhole of death and despair. For Kris and Billy, the titular franchise Camp Miasma offers a hopeful, cathartic release that is belied by the horror on its face.

Both films are defined by repetition. In It's Buddy, Buddy understands that once the credits roll, everything resets. This becomes a cruel ritual as a burned Buddy struggles to find the kids and reset the day, healing his wounds and, he hopes, undoing the damage done by kids who have discovered his violent tendencies. Camp Miasma is, like most slasher franchises, similarly defined by repetition and reset. The killer, Little Death, is the throughline to a series of sequels and knockoffs, just as Buddy is throughline to the otherwise rotating cast of It's Buddy.

Both films are premised on the permeable nature of the membrane between real life and the media, particularly media taken in on screens. Again, each film is a mirror of the other: Buddy finds its protagonist escaping into reality from a screen fantasy, while TSADACM finds its protagonist escaping reality into a screen fantasy. Each option has its perks.