No one understands internet kids quite like Jane Schoenbrun

“This isn’t the Midnight Realm, Maddy. It’s just the suburbs.”

I didn’t watch We’re All Going To The World’s Fair—I felt it. It was as though my body had been rendered almost completely inert. Meanwhile, my brain crashed backwards through decades, homes, and therapists to land in the center of my childhood bed, eyes prickling from hours of staring at a screen during that otherworldly part of night when the birds don’t sing and time feels like water. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything quite like it, and I don’t anticipate I will again.

In their freshman fiction feature, Jane Schoenbrun tapped into a milieu that’s impossible to fully grasp if you haven’t experienced its particular edges for yourself. The eerie, low-budget flick follows a lonely teenager named Casey (Anna Cobb) who turns to a viral participatory horror trend called The World’s Fair Challenge on YouTube, presumably to find some sort of meaning in their incredibly isolated life. I’m using “presumably” intentionally here, because the audience is never actually privy to Casey’s inner thoughts. We don’t even know if Casey is their real name. Instead, the distant camera forces us to align with an older man who goes by the username JLB (Michael J. Rogers), as he watches Casey descend deeper into either madness or completely clear-headed fantasy—we never really know for sure—through the videos they create to document the “effects” of the challenge; things like waking up in the middle of the night to flash a creepy smile or ripping up their beloved childhood doll.

In the end (spoiler alert), JLB breaks the delicate immersion of the game to tell Casey he’s worried about them, a gesture that one might assume would be comforting but actually causes Casey to lash out and then recede in anger. But wasn’t all of this a cry for help? Would someone who wasn’t suffering really stab their finger with a needle until they bled and then put that footage on the internet for everyone to see, as Casey does in the first few frames of the film? In some ways, of course it is. Casey’s shadowy bedroom—a place where we feel as trapped as they do—is an aching, claustrophobic space, one that feels like it was intentionally built for late-night YouTube dissociation, not for sleep.

At the same time, anyone who’s done their own time in that bedroom will immediately recognize Casey’s life on the internet as one of dark hope—an out-of-body portal that feels more real than real life. “The internet that we see in the film, I always describe as not realistic, but my dream of the internet that I knew. The thing the film is reflecting on most viscerally is an internet I used as a lifeline as a young queer kid, trying to figure themselves out online in 2000, 2001,” Schoenbrun, whose transition was closely tied to the production of this film, said in a 2022 interview with Variety. They continued:

It’s a space where you can exist without a physical form and without a body, so it’s obviously enticing if you’re not in the right body and trying to sort of escape yourself or create a new identity outside of the restrictions of physical form in the real world. This glowing light is very liminal. And that kind of liminality, when life really does feel like a dream, can be quite comforting when you feel like you’re not actually alive or this life that you’re living is somebody else’s, which are very under-discussed, very common traits of dysphoria and repressed transness.

Schoenbrun’s experience with dysphoria is acutely present in their work. Casey never defines their own gender, for example, until JLB assigns them female pronouns at the end of the film—another example of why his intrusion feels so violent. Still, while as a cisgender person I’ve never experienced this particular type of pain, Schoenbrun’s internet was also mine. As a closeted and anxious kid growing up in the suburbs, I also learned a lot more about myself within that “glowing light” than I did at school or with my IRL friends. (I write about film for a living now, so I guess it paid off.) I know what it’s like to scroll through hours of creepy mythology, haunted videos (remember “I Feel Fantastic”?), abandoned places, and other internet urban legends, because at least feeling the fear was better than feeling nothing at all. I too have invited ghosts into my bedroom just for a little company.

Schoenbrun was able to recreate that same murky magic in their excellent new film I Saw The TV Glow, which ventures away from creepypasta and towards the sort of fandom that grows teeth and threatens to swallow everything around it. The film follows Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a pair of mismatched kids who bond over their shared obsession with a Buffy-style series called The Pink Opaque. But while the film trades laptops for CRT TV, it’s as much a love letter to wayward internet denizens as anything else.

“I was a full-on video store kid,” Schoenbrun said in a recent Los Angeles Times interview. “There’s a church feeling about being surrounded by these holy objects that’s very childlike for me.” The director is about a decade older than me—my “video store” was Tumblr—but the feeling is the same. “Now I exist in spaces filled with people I love, but when I was a kid, 100% of that love went right to Buffy—I cared so much for those characters,” they said.

Lost and then Hannibal were my versions of Buffy. I spent so much time on fan wikis and other forums learning everything there was to know about the characters from those shows. While I often struggled to find my place within the constantly-shifting social dynamic of my tiny high school, Kate, Jack, Will, and Abigail were never surprising. They didn’t laugh at me or exclude me from the sleepover. We understood each other; I still sometimes think of them as friends.

I Saw The TV Glow could have pathologized Owen and Maddy’s disconnection from reality, but it doesn’t. It could have moralized about the importance of searching for that same connection in the real world, but it resists over and over. Again, I feel like I sat in that theater and metabolized the film rather than simply watched it, the whole time nursing a peculiar, heavy feeling in my chest. It wasn’t quite nostalgia, but it wasn’t pain either. It felt like being seen.

So many other directors have tried to make a definitive horror film for the digital age. Unfriended gave it a go in 2014, but spent most of its time with the kind of bullies that drove characters like Casey, Owen, and Maddy to their online safe havens in the first place. 2020’s Host played a similar trick, but would never have existed without the backdrop of our pandemic-based fear. Talk To Me starts as a clear-eyed takedown of the dangers of social media, but morphs into a completely different beast by the end; one I loved, but one that dilutes the metaphor nonetheless.

It’s clear that those films were written by people so desperate to expose the menace and terror of the internet, that they could never truly comprehend its real dangers—or its beauty. It’s clear that those films weren’t created by anyone who’d fully lived on the other side of the screen. I went into I Saw The TV Glow and We’re All Going To The World’s Fair expecting horror movies. Instead, I got a homecoming.