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Few filmmakers have really captured the fascinations of Gen Z quite like Jane Schoenbrun has – with their first film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair being a horror film centered on scary stories that circulate the internet and how quickly young people can get sucked into them. To follow that up, Schoenbrun brings forth I Saw the TV Glow, another sort of horror film that perhaps embraces a sort of existential crisis that may very well be best tracked down to how people cling onto media that they feel a particularly nostalgic connection towards. But it also delves into the realities that such people find themselves identifying with in a search for acceptance – to that end, it’s not only enough to make I Saw the TV Glow one of the year’s best horror movies, but a wholly devastating one at that.

Our story is one that starts in 1996, with Owen (Justice Smith) in the seventh grade and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) in the ninth grade. The two of them bond over a shared love of a television show called The Pink Opaque, but soon their connection to the show would also lead into them questioning the nature of their reality in the years moving forward. But even as the lines between the fictional world of their favourite show and the reality that they know begins to blur, something more horrifying comes into light. It also just as well might be where a greatly devastating picture comes into play, too.

Jane Schoenbrun’s influences are clear enough from the offset, for fictional television show The Pink Opaque as seen within I Saw the TV Glow feels lifted from audience’s responses to shows like Twin Peaks or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But Schoenbrun takes you into a whole other world where both these worlds blend into one: not just becoming a film all about people’s parasocial relationships with media that they love but also a commentary on the nature of the circumstances that build such connections in the first place. Much of this is stated from the offset, with Maddy being a lesbian and Brigette Lundy-Paine citing the film as an allegory for the transgender experience (noting that Schoenbrun is transgender themselves).

All this is very clearly stated by the manner in which Maddy and Owen connect with the world of The Pink Opaque too. Perhaps in how they engage with characters from a fictional world versus the circumstances of their real lives, where Maddy is ostracized for being a lesbian and Owen is told by his father that The Pink Opaque is a “show for girls.” But that’s never deterred either of our leads from being taken in with the world of the show, where it seems that they find greater comfort and a sense of acceptance, when the outside world scorns them for their mere existence.

That’s also where I Saw the TV Glow ends up becoming all the more horrifying, isn’t it? It’s not the same sort of horror film where you’re feeling dread because something’s coming to get you. It’s all a completely existential horror where you’re made to see everything from two versions of a reality that is known through the world of media consumption and nostalgia, and another one based on what we see every day. Yet there’s also a sense that you’ll find acceptance only in one, as it slowly consumes you by the minute before you’re reduced to nothing – it all results in something so innately devastating in turn.

It’s details like this that I think make I Saw the TV Glow so special. It’s a horror film all about not really being able to properly find your own place in the world because there’s no real acceptance to be found anywhere. For this alone, I find that it’s why Jane Schoenbrun has earned a place among the most exciting filmmakers working today – they’re working within a familiar genre to capture the woes of another generation, so as to allow them to be heard on the screen. But of course, it’s all a phase that seems familiar for many viewers at that, perhaps one that others may refuse to understand, even as those calls for help en masse are being made.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via A24.

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
Screenplay by Jane Schoenbrun
Produced by Sam Intili, Sarah Winshall, Emma Stone, Dave McCrary, Ali Herting
Starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan, Conner O’Malley, Emma Portner, Ian Foreman, Fred Durst, Danielle Deadwyler
Premiere Date: January 18, 2024
Running Time: 96 minutes