From “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell” to livestream gaming send-up “Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough,” Casper Kelly has always endeared himself to the ambitious and the offbeat. His talent has proven a golden egg for Cartoon Network’s adult nighttime programming block, with episodic contributions from Kelly on animated Adult Swim series’ “Squidbillies,” “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law,” and “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
Because Kelly’s history with Adult Swim is filled with TV episodes and short films, “Yule Log” (also titled “The Fireplace”) would be his first pitched feature film, and also Adult Swim’s first live-action horror movie. Kelly goes on to confirm to Bloody Disgusting that he got approval to stretch his idea for length, but only after he agreed to do the movie for the same budget — a challenge not in finances, but in taffy-pulling the concept from a bizarre short into a coherent (as coherent as generational time-jumping can be) ninety-minute movie.
Kelly elaborates to /Film’s Erin Brady:
“Oh man, I learned so much. I think with the Adult Swim stuff I do, which is usually 11 minutes, it’s almost like a ‘Three Stooges’ cartoon. But here, you need to have some more meaning, ideally, and some character arcs and some character changes and be about something, like a thematic debate about something. I think that helps … I mean, you don’t have to do that, but I thought it would be good to have that.”
Kelly further tells Erin that he’s “got the bug,” and has two projects in the works. Like his approach to “The Fireplace” the filmmaker has one foot in horror, the other in sci-fi; the rest is being kept under wraps for now, so keep your ears perked and eyes peeled, and keep those fires stoked for weird horror.