The television set has a proud place in horror history as a conduit to various twilight zones: think of Heather O’Rourke silhouetted by static in Poltergeist, or James Woods being hungrily devoured by the screen in Videodrome, or the dripping, dark-haired wraith from The Ring, arms bent and splayed as she crawls inexorably into the third dimension. The title of Jane Schoenbrun’s new and haunting film I Saw the TV Glow evokes these and other keynote moments, as well as the uncanny sensation—familiar to anyone who’s spent a significant part of their adolescence alone in the dark—that the scariest movies and shows are the ones that somehow seem to be watching us; the ones that hold our gaze only to refract it back with a new intensity.
Is it more frightening to be seen or to be invisible? The characters in I Saw the TV Glow live in the shadows because they like it there, but on some level they’re also afraid of being swallowed up in that same darkness. Or do they long to be ghosts within the machine? Queried about his sexual preferences, shy seventh-grader Owen (Ian Foreman) stammers, “I think that I like television shows.” It’s an earnest answer that suggests a soul still coming into formation, one jagged, tentative piece at a time.
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The degree to which popular culture shapes identity is at the heart of I Saw the TV Glow, which takes place in one of those idyllic, suburban enclaves that exist in the collective unconscious: Spielbergian outposts where kids already dealing with the dangers of coming of age end up having close encounters with stranger things. The film is set in 1996, on the eve of Bill Clinton’s re-election, as Owen finds himself on the edges of both his school’s ecosystem and popular culture. He’s infantilized by his parents, who won’t let him stay up on Friday nights to watch the long-running young adult serial The Pink Opaque. When he lobbies his father (Fred Durst) for viewing privileges, the old man sneers that it’s a show for girls—a remark that ends the conversation while somehow opening up a chasm of shame and longing.
Enter Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a striking introvert who haunts the halls of the high school. She’s a loner by choice, older and wiser than Owen in ways that only exacerbate her isolation. (When the girls in her class talk about alt-rock pinups, she cites Michael Stipe rather than Evan Dando.) Maddy is also so completely submerged in the lore of The Pink Opaque that she’s like a walking episode guide, and she craves acolytes for her cause. One night, she invites Owen over to watch his first episode and then surreptitiously sleep over in her living room—a solicitation that transcends high school flirtation and marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Whether it’s for a band or a basketball team or a YA TV series, everyone has memories that testify to the power and solidarity of shared fandom, and The Pink Opaque quickly becomes a love language between two characters who otherwise have trouble articulating themselves. The show itself has been visualized by Schoenbrun and their ace group of collaborators as an artifact somewhere between Goosebumps and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, centered on a pair of teenaged girls whose psychic bond offsets their geographical separation. The villain, meanwhile, is a literally moon-faced monster named Mr. Melancholy, who’s modeled after the title character of George Melies’s 1902 short A Trip to the Moon—or, more likely, the postmodern, Melies-inspired images in the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1996 video for “Tonight, Tonight.” Given the diminished status of Buffy creator Joss Whedon, it’d be easy to score points off the teen melodrama of The Pink Opaque, but Schoenbrun understands the power of nostalgia, and keeps the tone respectful while still allowing for the possibility that the show isn’t that great. Its true value lies in keeping lost kids like Owen and Maddy tethered to something tangible.
At this point in their career, Schoenbrun is an adept cartographer of psychic slippage—a virtuoso chronicler of media junkies sliding headlong into the maw of their own obsessions. 2018’s A Self-Induced Hallucination remains one of the definitive YouTube films, juxtaposing various passionate testimonies about the creepypasta axiom Slender Man, whose elongated iconography has subsequently infiltrated Hollywood. 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair draped a veil of fiction over similar themes of Extreme Online-ness, focusing its narrative on an impressionable preteen girl being led through the darkest corners of the internet by an unreliable guide. At their best, these films vibrate on a frequency of quiet, contemporary dread; they conjure the uncanny feeling of the world collapsing around your laptop.
I Saw the TV Glow maintains a similarly ominous tone but in a distinctly analog context: its story unfolds in a world of Moleskine journals, handmade mixtapes, and video-rental stores whose tape-slingers wear tucked-in, collared T-shirts. These and other period details are recreated in ways that feel less authentic than hyperreal; the film is a woozily color-coded fantasia whose various discontinuities speak to the distance inherent in memory. Schoenbrun isn’t a meticulous formalist à la Ari Aster, but they have a recognizable style all the same, fascinated as they are by tableaus of mutation and manifestation. The quasi-supernatural hook of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was the idea of a website that prompts actual, physical transformation in its visitors—the question there was whether such changeability was ultimately in the eye (or the mind) of the beholder. I Saw the TV Glow takes this theme and deepens it until it arrives somewhere submerged and primal—a sunken place beyond the purview of most “elevated horror.”
While it would be a disservice to reduce a filmmaker as inventive and ambitious as Schoenbrun to a specific set of themes—or a sociological agenda—it’s obvious that on some level, I Saw the TV Glow represents an attempt to wrestle with questions of gender representation and identity, threaded through more universal anxieties. Owen’s identification with Maddy and the heroines of The Pink Opaque is liberating, but it also leaves him at a loss when both disappear. As Owen ages out of boyhood, Foreman is replaced by Justice Smith, who retains enough of his predecessor’s tender, gawky awkwardness that we never doubt the transformation—or the discomfort the character seems to feel in his newly strapping body. His happiness at finding Maddy after nearly a decade of separation is undermined by the latter’s increasingly strange behavior; she seems to believe that the world of The Pink Opaque exists, and that she and Owen have become trapped in it against their will by Mr. Melancholy himself. Her delusions come complete with an escape plan that’s simultaneously outlandish and seductive, with built-in promises of revelation and catharsis—a pathway, once and for all, to a better life on the right side of the screen.
It’s a tricky thing to manage a truly reality-warping narrative at any scale, and Schoenbrun is smart enough to lean into visual and narrative abstraction rather than piling on exposition. Having established their characters as highly suggestible (and vulnerable), the filmmaker emphasizes the possibility that they—and we—are simply at the mercy of a series of self-induced hallucinations. In terms of out-and-out scares, the film doesn’t push as hard as one might expect, although it gets good mileage out of the idea that our childhood recollections of certain images or archetypes are considerably freakier than the real thing. (A run-in with Mr. Melancholy looks and sounds like authentic Gen Y nightmare fuel.) For all of its carefully wrought alienation effects, I Saw the TV Glow is also very much an inventory of things its creator loves: an ode to fandom that refuses to pass judgment on its characters’ obsessions. The most affectionate touches are musical: In a welcome nod to Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse, the film pauses for musical numbers that serve as a sort of Greek chorus, delivered by singers (including Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polachek) who strategically collapse the distance between Nickelodeon and SoundCloud.
The apotheosis of Schoenbrun’s everything-old-is-new-again project is Singaporean singer Yeule’s cover of “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” by Canadian indie-rock superstars Broken Social Scene—a crystalline evocation of adolescent innocence and self-absorption whose harmonies are like a time machine for anyone who came of age on either side of the millennium. Yeule’s fragile, open-hearted vocals are like the voice in the movie’s head—a beautiful conceit that takes on tragic dimensions when you realize the difference between singing out loud and whispering to oneself.
It’s difficult to honor the tragic power of I Saw the TV Glow without at least touching on its final scenes, which emphasize the literally suffocating terror of burying oneself in a life—and a persona—that they know to be a fiction. There’s a lot of Charlie Kaufman in these scenes, and some of the fatalism that made Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid so tough to swallow. Although, unlike those filmmakers, Schoenbrun isn’t an ironist—they refuse to make their characters into a punchline. It’s worth debating whether the sheer, abject sadness of Schoenbrun’s vision is a matter of calculated bleakness or uncompromising honesty; for some viewers, the directness of the coda’s address may be too much. At the end of I Saw the TV Glow, we’re shown that, for Owen—and, it’s implied, for many others—there is a light that never goes out. Whether it’s a source of warmth or a beacon of distress, it burns bright all the same.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.