I was in my teens when Barney & Friends began airing on PBS, so I was not exactly the show’s target audience. Barney was mostly the butt of jokes among my high school friends. I understood that the show was great for little kids, but to us, he was a big purple dinosaur who deserved nothing but ridicule. We were teenagers. Making fun of an overly cheerful dinosaur singing about love and friendship was practically part of the curriculum.

A few years later, I attended Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios in Orlando. I cannot remember the year or even which haunted house I was waiting to enter, but part of the queue wound through Woody Woodpecker’s KidZone. Universal had not placed anything scary there. The lights were simply turned off, letting the faint glow from the rest of the park illuminate the path. As I made my way through the darkness, I suddenly found myself face to face with Barney.

It was only a statue, but the ambient light cast deep shadows across his features and gave that goofy purple dinosaur a surprisingly sinister appearance. In that moment, I regretted every joke I had ever made about him, and Buddy understands exactly why a beloved children’s character can become terrifying once the lights go out.

Buddy is a 2026 horror comedy from director Casper Kelly. It’s Buddy! was a children’s television show that seemingly no one remembers. On the show, kids learn, play and go on adventures with a giant anthropomorphic unicorn named Buddy (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) and his colorful group of friends.

Freddy (Delaney Quinn), Wade (Caleb Williams), Josh (Luke Speakman) and the other children appear to enjoy their lives inside this make-believe world. That changes when Josh has a bad day and talks back to Buddy. Completely taken aback by his insubordination, Buddy’s wholesome and friendly demeanor begins to crack.

With the children trapped inside the show alongside an increasingly angry unicorn, a woman named Grace (Cristin Milioti) may be their only hope of escape.

Casper Kelly is the genius behind one of Adult Swim’s greatest shorts, Too Many Cooks. What begins as the opening credits for a cheesy family sitcom keeps going far beyond the point of reason, gradually moving through different genres before descending into violence, horror and complete madness. If you have never seen it, I highly recommend looking it up on YouTube.

Kelly has a gift for taking something familiar and nostalgic, finding the strange elements hiding just beneath the surface, and twisting them into pure nightmare fuel. He understands that the cheerful television shows we watched as children can become deeply unsettling when the smiles last a little too long or the colorful characters stop behaving as expected. That makes him the perfect filmmaker to unleash a children’s television mascot like Buddy.

Buddy follows two stories that slowly converge. The first takes place inside the colorful but increasingly dangerous world of It’s Buddy! where Freddy and her friends struggle to survive under the rule of the giant unicorn. What once seemed like a cheerful place filled with songs, games and life lessons becomes a prison controlled by a mascot who does not tolerate disobedience.

The second story follows Grace, who lives in the real world with her husband, Ben (Topher Grace), and their two children. Grace begins experiencing disturbing visions of Freddy and the forgotten television world she inhabits. As those visions become more intense, they lead Grace toward buried memories of Buddy that seem to have somehow vanished from her mind.

The mystery connecting these two worlds becomes just as important as the children’s fight to escape.

The movie is not particularly scary unless people in mascot costumes already make you uncomfortable. It does, however, deliver plenty of blood and guts. Much of that violence involves children, which was especially difficult for me to watch as a dad. Within the film’s demented storybook world, though, the brutality fits its macabre sense of humor without feeling as if it is there simply for shock value.

Thankfully, Kelly includes enough comedy to offset the violence. Those moments of humor give the audience a chance to breathe and help relieve some of the tension created by watching these children suffer. It is a tricky tonal balance, but the movie manages to make its darkest moments feel twisted and entertaining rather than relentlessly cruel.

I give Buddy five out of five stars.

It is bloody, over-the-top, wonderfully demented and exactly the kind of nightmare fuel I expected from Casper Kelly. He takes the cheerful characters, catchy songs and wholesome lessons of children’s television and twists them into something wonderfully macabre. The violence is excessive, the humor is bizarre, and the mascot at the center of it all becomes far more intimidating than a giant orange unicorn has any right to be.

Buddy fully embraces its strange premise and never apologizes for being weird. Even when the violence involving children made me uncomfortable as a dad, it still fit the twisted world Kelly created. It is creative, unpredictable and one of those rare horror comedies that can be funny without turning the horror into a joke.

After all these years, it appears I was right to be afraid of Barney.