Buffet Infinity is F*cking INSANE: The Funniest Cosmic Horror Movie Ever

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:02]You guys think if I got one of those fluffy little microphones, that might be kind of my downfall. That might be kind of the uh hello fellow kids moment for me. I don't I can't do it. I'm not going to do it. Hello and welcome to Nightmare Masterclass. My name is David Stockdale.

[00:00:20]I'll be your host on this excursion into the dark unknown. Today I want to talk about Buffet Infinity, a 2025 long- form analog horror film directed by Canadian comedian Simon Glassman, whose previous work I hadn't encountered before this.

[00:00:39]I'm going to talk about this for a while because it is with relatively little hesitation on my part the best long- form analog horror project I have ever seen. And because the things it is doing are interesting in ways I dare say might even transcend the genre. Most analog horror works in 5 to 15minute chunks.

[00:01:05]Sustaining it for 100 minutes is a structural problem that most projects in this space simply wouldn't be able to pull off. A quick caveat for viewers, I guess. If you're not into analog horror or experimental formats, the runtime might begin to test your patience. The film is genuinely a bit much. The thing it depicts, relentless commercial broadcasting, is something most viewers already get too much of. The filmmaker knows this.

[00:01:40]It seems quite deliberate. Normally, I watch movies with captions on just to make sure I'm getting all of the dialogue. This is especially helpful when the dialogue is relatively low in the mix. But for this one, I had to turn the captions off. The captions thing is where I want to start because it is the most physically concrete experiential fact about watching this film. and it tells you something about the kind of object you're dealing with before we even need to get into the plot or analysis or anything like that. So, simply put, Buffet Infinity is structured as an unbroken run of simulated television, commercials, news segments, public service announcements, occasional snippets of live programming.

[00:02:34]Every one of these segments is loaded with on-screen text, captions, chirons, legal disclaimers, store hours, phone numbers, dosage warnings, ad copy. If you turn on captions on top of all the diagetic text, you have so much textual information on screen at any given moment that you can't meaningfully read any of it. So, in this instance, you have to choose. I'm spending time on this because I think the slow forcible perceptual concession is what the film is in a fairly direct sense about the film is about the saturation of available attention by commercial broadcasting and the slow extraction of any kind of free perceptual space from the viewer over the course of an extended encounter with that very broadcasting. The captions issue is is just a small instance of the larger pattern that the film depicts at every level. Various entities within this work are competing for your attention. And over the course of the film, that competition becomes an arms race.

[00:03:48]Watching Buffet Infinity is to a degree I've not seen any other analog horror project achieve. a literal experience of the thing the film is depicting. Most horror films put a layer of separation, a frame between the viewer and the horror that's being depicted. You watch characters experience something and the film is a window you're standing outside of. Buffet Infinity collapses the frame because the form of the film is the form of the thing it depicts. You aren't watching characters watch TV. You're watching TV. The medium of the depiction and the medium of the depicted thing are the same medium. And so the dose of horror the film administers to the characters is also being administered at a lower concentration to you.

[00:04:46]I might liken it to lead poisoning. As an adult, your body can withstand a certain level of exposure to lead. But over time, when it starts to accumulate more and more, that's when the body begins to break down, and that's when the insanity commences. Similarly, the film administers a small dose of the horror to your perceptual system over the course of a featurelength film. And the dose slowly accumulates in ways these things accumulate in real life, which is by degrees, by stages, uh, and through the gradual conditioning of what kinds of noise the viewer comes to take as background over time. And before you know it, all of the major TV networks are just airing propaganda 24/7.

[00:05:40]Sounds kind of familiar. Of course, there is a striking similarity to Too Many Cooks directed by Casper Kelly, u an Adult Swim short that came out in 2014. Both use a TV broadcast paste that starts as comedy and metastasizes over time. both weaponize the viewers pattern recognition for a familiar broadcast register and then they use that against the audience. The Too Many Cooks comparison is more useful than the standard analog horror lineage like Local 58 or Gemini Home Entertainment because Too Many Cooks is also fundamentally a comedy that becomes horrific which is precisely what Infinity Buffet is doing as well. The analog horror cannon mostly isn't funny. Buffet Infinity is. I think it's funny. One significant difference worth noting, Too Many Cooks is like 10 minutes, and the horror arrives gradually through escalating violence within the sitcom frame. Conversely, Buffet Infinity is 100 minutes, and the horror arrives gradually through the commercial frame, which remains intact as the town behind it slowly gets eaten alive. The film takes place in Westridge County, Alberta. That's Canada. The town is really only presented to us through its commercial broadcast layer. We never really see the town directly. We see ads, local news, the PSAs, we see lawyer commercials, anti-depressant spots, as well as ads for what appears to be some kind of religious cult. The first stretch of the film is a fairly meticulous pastiche of small town television sequences. There's a personal injury lawyer with a small physical deviation whose ads run constantly and whose said physical deviation is something I promise you will not expect.

[00:07:44]There's a used car dealership. There's a sandwich shop called Jenny's, which is the apparent local institution. She's got the sauce. A competitor across the lot called Buffet Infinity has recently opened. There's also a pet store called Pet and Play, which becomes a source of an increasing number of missing pets.

[00:08:06]There's an anti-depressant whose commercial concludes with the legal disclaimer that the drug is not meant to prevent or cure any diseases. There's an insurance company with a memorably calm spokeswoman performing well, let's just say she's a not a normal person and she's not doing normal things in those commercials. There's a religious organization called the Westridge Society for Religious Freedom, which is initially presented as a kind of upbeat self-help operation. In one of their ads, the camera invites you to make a black dot disappear using only the power of your mind. And the dot does in fact seem to disappear for a moment because, of course, they've edited it out of the frame. These are the establishing pieces and the film spends a long time on them.

[00:08:57]Your patience is essential in order to appreciate what this thing eventually accomplishes. You have to know what the normal media texture of the town feels like before the texture starts to deform because otherwise the deformation has nothing to compare it against. I want to talk about why this thing works at the structural level and what the cult stuff is doing. It's important to consider the closing card as well. We will get into that, but consider this your spoiler warning. If you have not seen the film, I would recommend that you watch it. And I would recommend that you turn the closed captions off if at all possible because otherwise you're not going to be able to read everything on the screen.

[00:09:45]Around what I'd guess is the second act, the vibe starts to shift significantly.

[00:09:52]Buffet Infinity begins running ads that throw shades at Jenny's. Jenny's begins running ads that emphasize authenticity and a new banana themed special, which looked delicious. This film in general, the first act of it in particular, made me quite hungry. Um, also in the second act, the lawyer begins addressing the cult directly and he seems to be in a kind of feud with them for some reason that is unexplained. There is a loud droning sound that begins sporadically playing under the ads and it does not stop. Buffet Infinity takes over a second location in the strip mall and then a third and Buffet Infinity then introduces a beyond comprehension burger. I want to focus on the beyond comprehension burger because the joke is also weirdly accurate about the thing it is critiquing and the dual nature of that whole dynamic is fairly characteristic of how the film operates throughout. A burger named the beyond comprehension burger is at one level an absurd marketing object, a parody of the kind of grandiose product naming that fast food chains have done at scale since at least the late8s. At another level, it is a literal description of the entity that produced it. Within the context of the narrative, it's a Lovecraftian being that is in the process of taking over a small town. But of course, the film is using the concept to lambast something else. A corporation, after all, is a legal person whose interior life, whose decision making, whose relationship to its own actions is in various senses beyond comprehension by any of the actual humans participating in it. In some sense, the burger is named after the entity that made it. At around this point, people start to disappear. Jenny is the first whose disappearance is acknowledged as a proper disappearance.

[00:12:00]The Westridge Society begins running broadcast statements increasingly visible as the film progresses in which a man named Langden P. Hershey explains the society's theological basis. One of the things the organization believes is that there is an in between world in which a thousand years can pass in the blink of an eye. They also seem to believe that your loved ones can communicate with you from beyond the grave. Hershey himself later elaborates and says that he believes death is a social construct. He's the author of a book series called The Starship series, which the camera lingers on for slightly longer than is comfortable. Hershey is initially coded as the obvious antagonist. The lawyer seems to be uh fighting them on the basis that they are uh some kind of intimidating cult. They are going around extorting people and doing the things that cults do. A coalition has formed against the society. The local news is covering the cult angle with some level of seriousness. Then at some point, the cult's leader's head explodes on broadcast television. The film begins to suggest, without ever stating it directly, that the cult was perhaps not actually wrong about everything. In particular, what is happening in the town is being conducted in some indirect but not trivial way through the offices of Buffet Infinity. What Hershey was selling the in between world rhetoric and you know death as a social construct. This was a particular form of transcendence. The Starship series was the material instance of that offering.

[00:13:55]The Westridge Society was the institutional vehicle. People joined the cult because the cult offered to dissolve them into a larger, more meaningful unit of being. What Buffet Infinity offers by the end of the film is exactly that same thing, but it's conducted through a different institutional vehicle. People are dissolved into Buffet Infinity. They cease to exist in a recognizable form.

[00:14:26]They are absorbed into a corporate body which persists across time in a way no individual member of the town does. The corporation is the immortal entity. The corporation is the in between world. So the cult was telling the truth about the structural facts of the situation. I want to be careful here because I don't want to flatten the film into one singular interpretation or a oneline argument. The film is not asserting that corporations are cults. That is a reductive reading and I think the film resists that interpretation. What the film is asserting, I think, is that cults and corporations are both responses to the same underlying structural fact about contemporary life, which is that there are very few available institutional vehicles through which a person can dissolve themselves into something larger than themselves.

[00:15:28]And the available vehicles are increasingly indistinguishable in their actual operation. The cult seems to promise that you can join them and transcend death. The corporation promises that you can melt into the brand. Both promises seem to be accurate in a certain sense. Both vehicles do in fact dissolve you into something larger.

[00:15:53]The dissolution operates by something close to the same mechanism. In both cases, the erosion of the boundary between the self and the larger collective entity, the gradual sessation of perceptual space itself, the substitution of the entity signal for the signal of one's own life. And by the closing credits, when Buffet Infinity is the only restaurant entry, when their news is the only news, when their movie is the only movie, the dissolution is essentially complete. The town has become the entity. The signal has won.

[00:16:35]At a certain point, you do kind of realize that this sort of Eldridge horror, this horrific being that is Buffet Infinity, this thing that's taking over the town, is writing the narrative. It's in control of everything. The other thing that the film is doing, which is harder to talk about because it's more formal, is constructing a coherent world out of dream logic and then respecting the rules of that world rigorously enough that the dream logic functions as a kind of semi-realism.

[00:17:11]There's a specific sense in which Buffet Infinity is a strange, surreal, hard to follow movie. There's also a specific sense in which it is astoundingly consistent with the logic that it presents to the audience. The town has an internal coherence. The cult's theology is consistent. The corporation's expansion follows a certain kind of logic. The lawyer's commercials make sense as the kind of commercials a personal injury lawyer would make in this town. The beyond comprehension burger is named in a way that follows the rules of how Buffet Infinity names its products. So the dream logic is very intentionally constructed. It is not just random bullshit. The creator has a very specific vision in mind and the film's narrative coherence is what allows the surrealism to really land. I think it lands. You can't do effective surrealist work unless you know what the rules are.

[00:18:16]Buffet Infinity knows what the rules are. The rules are not ours, but they are internally consistent. And that allows for a kind of narrative stability. And that stability is what allows a surrealist work to register as meaningful instead of merely chaotic.

[00:18:35]This is the same distinction I find myself making about David Lynch, Stanley Kubri, um, some of the better stretches of the SCP wiki. It has to do with constraints. The constraint is the thing. Without the constraints, breaking the rules later does not register because there is no hard rule to break.

[00:18:57]With the constraint, the rule breaks register at exactly the right intensity because the work has demonstrated at length that it knows what it is doing.

[00:19:08]The cult leader's head exploding on broadcast television is the moment at which the film's internal physics permit a head to explode on broadcast television. The hour preceding it has been preparing the ground for that to be possible. What looks like surrealist anything goes type absurdism is actually the operation of a tightly specified set of rules applied consistently by a creator who has thought through the implications. What follows is nothing more than the extrapolation of a logic that is contingent upon infinite growth.

[00:19:48]That's the truly horrifying thing about this movie. Okay, so we're going to come back to the closing card here because I think it is one of the better jokes in the film and it is also one of its most serious moves at the same time. Written and directed by Buffet Infinity. The film in its final beat attributes its own authorship to the entity it has been depicting. This is on one hand a perfectly standard analog horror move.

[00:20:17]It is also on the other hand a fairly direct claim about the nature of cultural production under late capitalism. The ostensible aur in this scenario is a node of a corporate broadcasting apparatus and any film about that apparatus is in some meaningful sense also a product of it.

[00:20:40]Glassman directed Buffet Infinity.

[00:20:43]Buffet Infinity the entity also directed Buffet Infinity the film in the sense that the conditions of the film's production, distribution, and reception were shaped by the same broadcasting economy the film is depicting. So, I wouldn't say that the closing card necessarily denies Glassman's authorship, but it does complicate it by acknowledging that authorship under these conditions is always partial and always co-produced with the system the work is operating from within. The conditions the conditions Glassman is depicting are the conditions in which I have made my account of this film as well and in which you are watching this video. This very broadcast that you are watching right now is also subject to this same dynamic. We are all in the buffet. What the film accomplishes and what makes it the best long- form analog horror project I have seen is that it treats the genre as capable of doing more than just nostalgia and superficial creepy pasta memes. Buffet Infinity is doing something else with this toolkit. It's using the analog horror form to construct a sustained internally coherent formally rigorous statement about the nature of contemporary media saturation, the structural identity of both cults and corporations and the conditions under which the authorship operates inside the late capitalist broadcasting economy. It is in other words treating the genre as serious.

[00:22:28]It's a serious art form. Buffet Infinity, more than any other project I've seen, suggests what becomes possible when we treat analog horror as a serious art form. So, that's what I really appreciated about it. That wraps it up for this installment of Nightmare Masterclass. If you like my videos, maybe check out my Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/nightmaremasterclass.

[00:22:54]I also have a YouTube membership option if you would prefer to support me that way. If you would like to do that, just click the join button. Um, yeah, that's all I have. That's all I got for you for right now. Um, I hope you have a good one and I I hope that the uh infinite logic of uh profit of capital accumulation doesn't destroy us all, but it seems to be. So, I guess I got to keep making videos. Bye.