Worth Mentioning - An NFT Horror Story

Cody talks about Kevin Smith's NFT horror movie.

Elements of this KillRoy Was Here review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

The concept of the Kevin Smith horror movie Tusk came out of an episode of Smith’s SModcast podcast in which he and his co-host Scott Mosier started out joking about the idea of a walrus-themed body horror movie and then, in the midst of the banter, Smith was inspired to actually make the movie. (And I’m very thankful that he did.) Smith’s horror anthology KillRoy Was Here started out in a similar way. It has its roots in an episode of the Edumacation podcast, where Smith and co-host Andy McElfresh “accidentally brainstormed a Christmas horror anthology” that would revolve around the child-eating creature known as Krampus. Smith and McElfresh wrote a script and were moving ahead with the film, which was first called Comes the Krampus! and then re-titled Anti-Claus, but then it got abandoned when Michael Dougherty’s Krampus movie was released. It only sat dormant for a few years before Smith decided to rework it into something else… and the result is KillRoy Was Here.

The script was rewritten. The Christmas element was ditched. Smith had revealed the names of the Anti-Claus stories (The Krampus vs. The Third Grade, Hitler’s Krampus, Mask Masker, The Proposal, and wrap-around The Bad Babysitter), and judging by those, it appears most of the stories were replaced. Krampus was swapped out for a new character called KillRoy, inspired by the “Kilroy was here” graffiti that became popular during World War II, showing a long-nosed man peeking over a fence. In this case, KillRoy started out as a Florida man named Roy Huggins, who was raised on a farm and became the designated chicken killer at a young age. Roy was a soldier in the Vietnam War, not World War II, and when he was captured by enemy soldiers he got loose, killed a whole lot of people, and cannibalized one of the corpses. He had to be locked up in a mental institution, and when the place caught on fire Roy was left to burn. Now he’s a supernatural being who stalks the Florida swamps, and his burns have left him looking a lot like that figure in the Kilroy graffiti. 

Roy’s back story is told very quickly up front by a bad teenage babysitter; Wendy, played by Harley Quinn Smith, who turns in a very solid and believable performance as this bad babysitter. While watching a little girl named Tyler (Zoe Burney, who has some amusing lines and line deliveries), Wendy decides to tell the kid all about the legend of KillRoy. We’re shown four stories that involve the character: Sunny, Miss Bowers, Father Pat, and Gator Chaser. Then The Bad Babysitter brings the film a twisted ending.

In Sunny, we get Smith regular Betty Aberlin (always remembered for her work on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) as a mother whose young daughter Sunny (Daisy McElfresh) was stricken by a mysterious heart problem soon after Sunny’s dad died of the same issue. There’s something fishy going on here, of course, and KillRoy is going to show up to make sure the guilty – and maybe some innocents as well – will be punished. Surely Alvelo plays Miss Bowers, a teacher who’s going through play rehearsals with a couple of her young students. Miss Bowers isn’t from Florida, so it’s up to the kids, and goofball janitor Chet (played by Jason Mewes), to tell her about KillRoy. George Carlin once told Smith that his dream acting role would be to play “a priest who strangles children”. Sadly, Smith didn’t get the chance to cast Carlin in such a role. Ralph Garman doesn’t do any strangling as Father Pat, but he is a scumbag who takes the young children of detained illegal immigrants on “camping trips” every month, right before the kids get deported to their home countries. Thankfully, KillRoy is around to interrupt Father Pat’s latest camping trip. We watch another repugnant human being in action when Chris Jericho shows up to play the Gator Chaser (actually, the character spells it GaterChaser), who gets his kicks by destroying people’s lives on his livestreams. GaterChaser’s fun times come to an end when he meets a woman played by Neela Howard.

The segments are pretty good, moving along at a nice pace, featuring some righteous retribution, and giving KillRoy multiple chances to hack people to pieces. The main issues come from confusion about the mythology. Things said about KillRoy don’t always line up with things that we see, we get some information out of order, and sometimes it’s tough to get a handle on what the character is actually about. Wendy informs us that KillRoy has a psychic bond with children; if a kid says his name, he thinks they’re calling him. But it’s okay for her to say his name, because she’s “too old for him”. She doesn’t tell us that you have to say KillRoy’s name three times for him to appear – but we see name references being counted in Sunny, which comes before we’re told about the “three times” rule in Miss Bowers. Along the way, we learn that there’s actually no age limit. When the movie was first announced, KillRoy was referred to as “a baby-eating monster”, much like Krampus. In the midst of production, a crew member suggested that maybe KillRoy is actually working on behalf of children instead, and Smith decided to go with that. But the idea of KillRoy being a protector of children goes against information given in Miss Bowers, which was apparently shot before the change of approach was implemented. Also, I have no idea why KillRoy does what he does in the Gator Chaser segment.

Despite the confusion, I had a good time watching KillRoy Was Here – which has a running time of just 63 minutes, so a viewing doesn’t take much out of your day. The movie was made on a minuscule budget as a project with film students at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida (thus the Florida setting), and it has that scrappy “let’s put on a show” feeling throughout. Some viewers may be put off by the budgetary limitations, but it worked fine for me, since I watch micro budget horror movies all the time.

KillRoy Was Here hasn’t been seen by many people, but it is famous (or infamous) for being the movie that Smith decided to release as an NFT. I’m not sure how well that release worked out. The investors probably got a nice amount of cryptocurrency out of it, and yet releasing the movie as an NFT seems to have been the equivalent of dropping it into a void, as far as viewer engagement online is concerned. Although there are 1000 NFT copies out there, only a few reviews have shown up on sites like Letterboxd and reddit, and the single review currently on IMDb was written by someone who saw it at a film festival in the theatre Smith owns. There’s a chance that over a thousand people have seen KillRoy Was Here, and yet only maybe ten have said anything about it. Clearly, there’s little overlap between those who are into NFTs and those who enjoy discussing films online. Although the movie was officially released a year and a half ago, there has been so little said about it, there are probably many fans who aren’t even aware that it was ever released at all. For some of those who are aware, the concept of NFTs is so off-putting and/or incomprehensible, they’ll never have access to it anyway. Unless it’s released in another format someday, KillRoy Was Here is practically a “lost film” at this point. The Kevin Smith movie that only a fraction of his fans have seen.

Given that the running time is so short, it’s odd that Smith decided to remove an entire segment from the movie, but that’s what happened. It’s called The Lost Chapter, and it was split into ten parts that were dropped randomly throughout the various NFTs. The segment seems to be about a car accident involving an impaired driver and a child on the road… but it’s likely that no one will ever see this segment in its entirety, unless they go on a KillRoy NFT buying spree or the movie gets a more traditional release someday, where the segment could be included as a deleted scene or reintegrated into the movie. I have my fingers crossed for the traditional release option, because I would gladly add a copy of KillRoy Was Here to my physical media collection, to keep the Kevin Smith Movie section complete. I’m a Smith fan and a horror fan, so this movie is right up my alley. But I’m also a collector, so I would love to have a copy of KillRoy Was Here that I could hold in my hands. If that’s not feasible, at least drop it onto a streaming service so more film fans can check it out. That’s not only bringing entertainment to a wider audience, it’s also a bit more profit for the investors.

It’s a shame that KillRoy Was Here has been locked away, as it was a fun concept with franchise potential. I’m sure it would find a following among fans of Smith and the horror genre, if only more people could see it.

In the meantime, the only way to see KillRoy Was Here is to purchase an NFT (now on the secondary market) or get an NFT savvy friend to show you their copy.