Bad Toys: Rooster Teeth's Founders Reunite for Elf Horror
Forget Buddy the Elf. The Christmas elves in Matt Hullum and Burnie Burns' new movie "Bad Toys" come from a much older, much nastier bloodline — and they are not interested in syrup spaghetti.
From Animation to Elf Folklore
Hullum and Burns co-founded Rooster Teeth back in 1998, building it into one of the biggest names in online animation and web series before Warner Bros. Discovery shut the company down in 2024. Burns bought the brand and its remaining IP back through his company Box Canyon Productions in early 2025, relaunching the site later that year. "Bad Toys" is one of the clearest signs yet that the Rooster Teeth revival has real teeth: Hullum is writing and directing, Burns is executive producing, and the two are explicitly billing it as a chance to "reunite with some of my Rooster Teeth family," in Hullum's words.
The premise sounds like a twisted fairy tale because that is exactly what it is. "Bad Toys" asks what happens if a mischievous Christmas elf grants your wish when you have been nice — and makes you deeply regret it when you have not. According to Hullum, the idea started at home: his wife has a habit of hiding Christmas elf dolls around the house to prank him, which sent him down a research rabbit hole into elf mythology. What he found was a centuries-old tradition, mostly Scandinavian, full of mischievous and sometimes outright deadly elves — a far cry from the cheerful toy-shop helpers Christmas marketing has trained us to expect.
A Genre Mashup With Real History Behind It
That's the hook that makes "Bad Toys" worth watching for horror fans specifically. Christmas horror has its own small, devoted subgenre — from "Black Christmas" to "Krampus" to the "Gremlins" movies that basically invented the "cute thing, deadly thing" Christmas creature template. "Bad Toys" is positioning itself in that lineage, but with folklore as its backbone instead of a wholesale invented monster. Medieval and early-modern Scandinavian elf lore really does include figures far darker than the red-suited elf of modern branding: creatures blamed for sickness, missing livestock, and misfortune visited on households that crossed them. Building a horror-comedy around "be nice to the elf or else" taps into that folklore directly rather than just slapping fangs on a plush toy.
Flatiron Pictures is producing, with Suzanne Weinert attached. Pre-production is slated to begin in early 2027, with the film currently targeting a theatrical release around Christmas of that same year — meaning horror fans have a full year-plus of waiting ahead, but also a long runway for casting news, first-look images, and the kind of festive dread marketing that a premise like this practically writes itself.
Why This One Stands Out
Christmas horror-comedy is a crowded shelf, but "Bad Toys" has two things most entries in the genre don't: filmmakers with a genuine personal hook into the material, and a production company explicitly reuniting a team that built a fanbase from scratch once already. Hullum and Burns spent decades building Rooster Teeth's reputation on scrappy, personality-driven storytelling, and that sensibility carries over naturally into a movie about an elf that takes "naughty or nice" very literally.
With pre-production still more than a year out, there's a long wait ahead before anyone sees a frame of "Bad Toys." But between the folklore angle, the first-time theatrical outing for this particular duo, and a premise built for a killer teaser trailer, this is one Christmas horror project worth bookmarking now.
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