Wicked Horror chats with Simon Glassman about A.I., the future of horror and the greatest Napoleon zombie musical you’ll (probably) never see on the silver screen!
Maybe it’s a coincidence that my video interview with Buffet Infinity director Simon Glassman turned into such a technological turd storm.
Or maybe it isn’t.
If you’ve seen Buffet Infinity — and we here at Wicked Horror have been singing its praises for quite a while now — you’ll know that it’s a hard movie to summarize in a single sentence. But at heart, it’s a film about the mediums of media. It is, after all, a movie literally built out of faux commercials, which eventually lead to an all-out analog-cosmological apocalypse … and a joyous song-and-dance routine, which contextually makes no sense and ALL of the sense in the universe at the same time.
The medium for my interview with Alberta’s Glassman (he’s an Edmonton Oilers fan, by the way) was Zoom. And as fate would have it, when the final video was spat out by the hidden gods of the internet, literally zero of my audio was recorded. You could still hear Simon as clean and clear as a freshly bought whistle, but the final product was him answering totally silent questions from yours truly.
If it was any other movie and any other director I would’ve chucked the whole thing in the digital dustbin and begged and pleaded for a re-interview. But considering the creator and the creation, I thought it was kinda fitting to make lemons out of lemonade and ShotCut all of Simon’s responses into a MP4 collage that almost resembles an actual, honest-to-goodness, professional grade interview.
It actually sorta worked, and when it didn’t work it actually worked even better. I know that sounds like the ravings of a madman, but trust me, once you listen to it … you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Interestingly enough, Wicked Horror interviewed Glassman just a day or two after he was nominated for a Fangoria Chainsaw award for best first time feature film, putting him in direct competition with the likes of Kane Parsons and Markiplier.
Everybody says their film is a labor of love, but in the case of Buffet Infinity it actually fits the bill. Glassman took a full five years to complete the project, which was still operating under COVID restrictions when filming began.
“We shot in the River Valley, we shot on rooftops, we shot in offices, there’s got to be like hundreds and hundreds of different set ups in the movie,” Glassman said. “With a bunch of different directors of photography, a bunch of different actors and a lot of stuff that didn’t end up making it into the movie.”
Glassman described his film as “storytelling Sudoku” — which is the absolute PERFECT label for a movie that would otherwise be immune to any of them.
Buffet Infinity was filmed without a singular, overarching script. Glassman said he wasn’t even sure one of his principal actors — Ahmed Ahmed, who plays an opportunistic pawn shop keep in the flick — realized he was starring in a movie for quite some time.
“We would be hanging out and he was like ‘Man, are we doing the skits again?’” Glassman recalled. “I had to lure him in with pizza to get him to come to the set.”
Learning that Glassman is a storyboard artist is something of an “A-ha!” moment. You’d have to have the mentality and eye of a storyboard artist to make something as thematically bizarre as Buffet Infinity exist, let alone come across as coherent.
Telling the whole of Buffet Infinity, he continued, meant mastering the art of short-form storytelling.
“I feel like the biggest creative work is the editing,” he said. “That was the whole fun of making that last film … I wish I could still be working on it.
If you grew up in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s the UHF aesthetics of Buffet Infinity certainly ring familiar. Watching Glassman’s film, I was reminded of all of the used car dealership commercials that used to dot the syndicated TV stations of my youth. They would heckle and mock and jest one another in a fashion practically identical to the feuding restaurants of Buffet Infinity.
Glassman may have shot the film in Alberta, but he’s heard from many viewers who are *convinced* the movie was inspired by their hometowns.
“I get messages from people that are like ‘oh my god, this guy has literally been to Baltimore,’” he said. “And I’ve never been to Baltimore.”
Glassman said there’s definitely a touch of hypernormalization to his film. He noted that the routine, pedestrian elements of everyday life circa 2026 would probably sound terrifying to someone from 1998.
“They’d be like, ‘oh my god, you have a phone that reads your mind and gives you advertisements for towelettes?’” he said.
You may have noticed that one of the main characters in the film bares a passing resemblance to a certain Dianetics-writing, Church of Scientology-founding science fiction scribe.
Legally speaking, Glassman said he has no idea what I’m talking about. He did, however, note that John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness was definitely an influence on his movie.
His film, Glassman continued, is basically a horror movie about municipal bureaucracies and attorney jargon.
“Everybody in town knows that Buffet Infinity is evil, but they just legally can’t really do anything about it,” he added.
As popular as Buffet Infinity is — Glassman said he’s particularly wowed by all of the fan art sent to his inbox — you can’t help but wonder: are we seeing sequel and perhaps even franchise opportunities with the I.P.?
“It would have to be ultra meta,” he said. “Or, you know, just like a found footage movie inside of Buffet Infinity.”
He noted than an unauthorized version of his film was released in China, complete with a wildly mistranslated title. It won’t happen in a million years, but Glassman nonetheless said he’d be delighted to helm a crossover movie: Buffet Infinity vs. Unlimited All-You-Can-Eat Restaurant.
“If there’s a huge demand for it and there’s a dump truck of money, I’ll do anything,” he said.
Speaking of dream projects, Glassman said he’s jokingly batted around an idea for an absurdly expensive musical loosely based on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte as his next movie production.
Naturally, it involves zombies, Genghis Khan, the ghost of Joan of Arc and George Washington’s head getting eviscerated. Think of it as combination of J’accuse, The Breakfast Club and From Justin to Kelly.
With movies like Obsession and Backrooms making beaucoup bucks at the box office, the question arises: will their success be a boon for indie filmmakers like Glassman or just lead to a deluge of crappy, half-hearted Creepypasta ripoffs from studios who obviously have no idea what their bankrolling?
Glassman’s prediction? Probably both.
“Who is sitting in a movie theater in 2026 who is like ‘oh man, I hope this movie is exactly like every other freaking movie I’ve ever seen?’” he said. “If we’re going to compete with A.I. and the internet and people working at their absolute peak capacity to create interesting content that’s compelling for people, we can’t just be making movies that are just the same thing but with, like, younger people.”
