'Backrooms,' 'Obsession' and the pipeline of YouTube fame to horror? Casper Kelly is way ahead of you

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Set us as preferred If Casper Kelly ever found himself in the 2014 horror film “It Follows,” in which a sexually transmitted malevolent entity pursues its victims until it kills them, he knows exactly how he would survive.“What I would do is go to Australia, have sex with a stewardess and then come back home and that thing would have to walk slowly through the Pacific Ocean to Australia,” the filmmaker says, completely sincerely.“But also, the stewardess is flying around so much that they are probably safe too.”Kelly has clearly given this a lot of thought, long before he sits with me in a Beverly Hills office.

He knows it’s weird.“That ends up coming off to people as funny because it is funny, but that’s just how my brain is,” he says.Kelly’s imposing height, several inches above 6 feet, contrasts with his soft facial features and warm smile, making him the poster child for the figure of the gentle giant.

His white hair betrays his Gen-X age.The “It Follows” escape plan is, as it happens, a window into Kelly’s celebrated talent for taking a narrative formula and turning it on its head, often with a sinister edge.The latest example of this creative approach is “Buddy,” in theaters Friday, which takes the aesthetics of a ’90s kids show like “Barney” or “Blue’s Clues” to carve out a monstrous dupe.A person-in-a suit character like Big Bird, Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly adorable orange unicorn who presides over a group of children in a blue-skied TV-show reality filled with song, dance and anthropomorphized objects like mailboxes or a couch.

But Buddy doesn’t like it when the children don’t obey him.“When something has a veneer that is very pleasant and there’s no messiness or warts, you wonder if there’s something going on underneath,” Kelly says....