I Saw the TV Glow Is an Instant Cult Classic. Jane Schoenbrun Tells Us Where It Came From

Courtesy of A24

Jane Schoenbrun was born to make cult classics. After generating buzz with their 2021 Sundance breakout We’re All Going to the World’s Fair– an eerie microbudget gem inspired by shadowy Internet enclaves– the writer/director follows it up this week with I Saw The TV Glow, another mystifying, atmospheric coming-of-age story made to resonate with a very specific audience.

“The first thing that I said to the crew was, ‘I want to make a movie that plays at the IFC Center at midnight for the next 20 years,’” Schoenbrun tells me during a recent conversation at A24’s office in Los Angeles, articulating the liminal magic of the midnight movie. “They take place in this dark underworld, and play best at that hour when you're not supposed to be awake. They're pulling the rug of waking life out from under you. It can feel scary, but also beautiful.”

Schoenbrun’s scary beautiful rug-puller follows Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), two unpopular suburban teens who bond over a shared obsession with The Pink Opaque, a supernatural TV series reminiscent of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Twin Peaks. After the show is canceled and Maddy mysteriously vanishes, Owen grows increasingly uncertain of his reality. I Saw the TV Glow is a tastefully reverent collage of ‘90s nostalgia – Fruitopia vending machines, Bratmobile and Tiger Trap posters, and even Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst in a small role as Smith’s father– but it also feels untethered from time itself.

Although TV Glow is ostensibly a horror film, it stands decidedly apart from beloved A24 bloodbaths like Midsommar or Pearl. (A more apt comparison within the studio’s canon might be Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, or beyond that, the films of Gregg Araki and David Lynch.) Schoenbrun assembles their many influences and experiences into something inarguably singular, using genre to plumb the unconscious and awaken something deep within. The looming terror of TV Glow is not a crazed killer or fantastical beast, but the psychological violence of dysphoria and the dissociative oblivion of suburban existence—the specter of life unlived. But similar to the feeling The Pink Opaque gives Owen and Maddy, TV Glow offers comfort even as it unsettles; a knowing hand on your shoulder guiding you through the dark.

Like any teen movie worth its salt, TV Glow is also outfitted with an eclectic, ethnographic soundtrack, comprising original songs by alternative all-stars hand-picked by Schoenbrun, including Caroline Polachek, Jay Som, and Frances Quinlan. (For the score, Schoenbrun reunites with World’s Fair collaborator Alex G.) Among the highlights is a glitchy cover of Broken Social Scene’s indelible 2002 classic “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl” envisioned by Singaporean cyber-pop artist Yeule– a commission that nicely correlates to TV Glow’s themes about recontextualizing the past.

The precious, intensely personal touch Schoenbrun lends to the soundtrack is symptomatic of their crafting of the film overall; TV Glow has the intimate, scrapbook quality of a gel pen-scrawled note slipped into your locker, or a scratched-up mix CD made by a friend. It feels at once like a visitation to a past life and a celestial transmission from another world.

Schoenbrun took the time to chat with GQ about jumping from microbudget filmmaking to working with A24, their formative love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more.

GQ: Where does the name The Pink Opaque come from?

JANE SCHOENBRUN: A Cocteau Twins compilation album from the 1980s. It was a placeholder at first, and then I was like, “I gotta come up with a TV show name as good as The Pink Opaque,” and I couldn't. It's incredibly hard to come up with a good name for a '90s TV show that doesn’t sound like a parody. It's such a gorgeous phrase, too. It’s mythological in this really fun way.

In a tweet, you alluded to the film having a connection to Frasier… Can you explain?

In an early version of We're All Going To the World's Fair, actually, there was a subplot in that movie about this group of edgelords on the internet who, in this very irony-poisoned way, were all obsessed with Frasier, and they called themselves the Crane Crew. They built these custom coffins with a television screen on the inside of the lid, and they would bury themselves alive with a live feed into the coffin so you could watch them watching Frasier underground. They would watch Frasier from the beginning and binge it until they starved to death or suffocated or died. They'd just be lying there staring straight up as it played and people would be like, “What episode are they up to?” and it would be this Internet phenomenon.

So yeah, when I saw that tweet some kid sent out about, “What if it was I Saw the TV Glow for Frasier,” I was like, “That's crazy, because actually…”

If you had to pick a show to be programmed into your coffin…

To slowly suffocate and starve to death while watching? Frasier! [Laughs] Maybe Planet Earth. Maybe you just want to go gently into the good night. The Great British Bake Off. I feel like if you go with something that's too much of a balm, it almost becomes a sick joke.

You’ve got to rage against the dying of the light just a little bit.

Exactly.

When and how did TV Glow materialize in relation to World’s Fair?

I wrote TV Glow in October-November of 2020, as I was waiting to find out if World's Fair was going to get into Sundance. I think I was distracting myself, or just getting some stress out in a productive way. I knew that it's very easy for a small debut film like World's Fair to slip through the cracks, and so the future that I wanted to have as an artist felt very vulnerable at that moment.

I was going through a lot of intense personal stuff with early transition that was also inspiring where TV Glow came from. It had been an idea that I had been wrestling with for a long time and kind of knew should be the next film. It came out of this intense emotional moment and also this pivot point in my life as an artist where I really needed to commit to, like, if World's Fair was this whispered promise of something, what could be a louder scream of a movie? That’s where TV Glow came from.

A lot of the work from World's Fair to TV Glow was about, like, how do I make this fraught jump from making a movie in the woods with no resources, which is an unsustainable art practice, to working within a commercial system while holding onto creative autonomy, and as a queer person, speaking about things authentically without getting corrupted by the system? I'm still learning how to do that. My job as an artist isn't just to exist in some imagined realm of freedom; it is to understand the commercial system that I'm working within, and understand how I am operating as an artist within that system, to do something that I can be proud of.

That’s the never-ending challenge of being an artist, I suppose, to reconcile those forces.

It's also really exciting. I grew up on pop culture, and obviously this is a movie about that. I found the inspiration to become who I am in the video store rentals and cable TV shows of my youth. So it is also fuel for me, because I want to be speaking on a cultural level about things that feel honest and provocative and unspoken, and I need this whole system [in order] to do that. It's a myth to be able to do that as a separatist. It can feel like performance art on a good day, or absolutely psychotic and identity-crushing on a bad day.

How did you experience the jump in scale for this production compared to the previous film?

It felt like making my first movie for the second time. I prepared rigorously for both films, but there was no way for me to learn what I learned by [making World’s Fair] before I went through that process. The process of jumping up in scale to the degree that I did on this one was [similarly] something that I needed to experience before I could fully grasp how to plan for that. So much of production at this scale is about knowing the hierarchies within the departments and how they interact with each other, and infrastructural managerial experience.

It was just a crazy experience, you know? I remember the first day of production, walking to set and seeing a fleet of trucks and being like, “These trucks are here because of this weird trans trauma thing that I went through.” That is humbling and crazy. It feels like witchcraft, in a way, or a form of high-level mischief.

What were you looking for when casting the project, and what did you ultimately find in Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine?

So much of casting for me is just finding somebody that I connect with, or that I'm fascinated by, or that feels like they operate on an emotional tenor that will be generative to the process of making the movie. It's less like, “This person is perfect for this character as I've conceived them,” and more like, “This character is perfect for this person.”

I met Brigette a year before casting began, and immediately knew that Brigette was going to be Maddy, [based on] talking to them about their own experience playing a queer character on [Atypical] and their own experience being publicly trans, and feeling a desire to explore their identity as a different person than who they'd become known for playing on TV. It felt like there was so much for both of us to learn about via Maddy, as a character who literally becomes somebody else as the film goes on. It felt very positive and enriching and challenging and emotionally raw to give that to Brigette as a performer. Brigette is extraordinarily talented and brilliant, and getting to collaborate with them was such a joyful experience.

Justice does this thing that I think is very rare for actors of his generation, which is that his level of craft and commitment to disappearing into a role is really pronounced. I had seen him in so many different things, and even though I knew it was Justice every time, I felt like I was watching a completely different person. That, to me, has always felt like the sign of somebody who can do something exciting. I liked the idea of him stepping into the role of Owen because I'd never seen him play somebody who's not charming. I'd seen him play all of these different characters, but I'd never seen him play somebody who is sort of withdrawn and stuck inside himself.

The two of them together also really excited me. I was able to imagine what it would be like to see Justice and Brigette sitting together on the bleachers of the football field, and it just felt right, in this almost mythological way. The two of them as these icons of a certain kind of teen movie felt worthy of the opportunity.

The soundtrack is a really big, really special part of this project. What were your guiding principles in commissioning the original songs?

Teen angst was a guiding principle. I told A24, “I want to make one of the best soundtracks ever, that can be a document in the same way as a John Hughes soundtrack, or the Donnie Darko soundtrack.” I also just selfishly wanted it to be all original songs. Like, why would I take songs that already exist, when I could go through the creative process of watching my favorite artists write new music and create things that can all exist in the universe of the film?

From there it was more intuitive. It wasn't like math. It was like making a great mixtape. Every artist is an artist that I'm a huge fan of. Someone like Frances [Quinlan]– I was going to Hop Along shows before they released their first album. I had been a super fan for a decade. I had worked with Alex G on World’s Fair, and knew that he was friendly with Frances, and was like, “Can you introduce me to my hero?”

In terms of genre, there's definitely a predilection for a certain kind of queer, sad girl energy, but it's not just that. And even the people who are that are maybe doing something a little bit different here. I wanted it to be a nice mix of [lesser-known] artists and then pop icons like Caroline Polachek, creating this document that could be both discovery and an all-star team.

And then I think the last piece of it was giving everyone the right marching orders and inspiration. Like talking to Jay Som about Teenage Fanclub and being like, “Write a single that would've been a huge hit in 1994.” And then talking to Frances like, “I'd love to hear what you do with a Portishead kind of trip hop drum beat,” and giving them a lot of space to do what they do really well. I'm so proud of the soundtrack and really want it to exist as its own thing for a long, long time.

What TV shows or other media did you have a connection with in your youth the way Owen and Maddy do with The Pink Opaque?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the primary nexus of the film. I put a lot of myself and a lot of love into my fandom for Buffy. I had other shows that I loved, but that one will forever be the first love, and I think I mean that fairly literally.

The movie is obviously in conversation with those feelings, and The Pink Opaque itself is in conversation with Buffy. When I go back now and excavate my obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the things from it that resonated the most, part of it is that those characters were like family to me. I loved them and cared about them and they occupied space in my mind more than the people in my real life probably did. But beyond that, there was this central thing to Buffy, where Buffy wants to be like all the other girls, but she's a vampire slayer. When Buffy comes out to her mom as a vampire slayer, her mom's like, “You're crazy,” and “Have you tried not being a vampire slayer?” I probably don't need to spell it out too much more, [but] I was relating to that because I was trans and didn't realize it.

I needed to be exploring those things emotionally, and at that age it was a lot easier to do that through fiction than to actually look in the mirror and figure out who I was. It was a place to put a lot of love, which there wasn't really an outlet for in my immediate surroundings in my youth.

How has your relationship to media changed in adulthood?

Post-transition, it's not the same. It's hard to know how much of that is [gender] transition, and how much of that is transition to being an artist who is [now] putting a lot of that love into my own work. I think a lot of it is the fact that I'm no longer dissociative the majority of the time. I'm no longer living in a fantasy world in my head or on a screen. I'm deeply engaged with a life that I love, with a lot of loved ones in it, and I am making work that I think is coming from the same places that my love of Buffy, or whatever it was, at whatever age, came from. I'm stepping into the role of participating in this exchange, not just as a fan, but as somebody who's putting themselves out there. And so that all-encompassing, parasocial, almost dissociative obsession with media is something that has receded in the last few years for me. But I still love art.

How do you think TV Glow either upholds or deconstructs conventions of the horror genre?

When I think about my love of horror, it's usually [about] one of two things. It's either, "I love this because it's incredibly destabilizing and horrific and powerful," or, "Wow, I can't believe I just had a front row seat to that feast of gore." There's something very joyful for me about contemporary horror especially; it's festive, like a night out at the fair. Like we're all going to the joust and cheering on the next kill.

That's not where this work is coming from. This work is coming from more of an art film vernacular or a lineage of slow cinema. [There’s a] Kelly Reichardt style coming-of-age energy, and Lynchian and Cronenberg-esque surrealism, but not with the goal of taking you on a shock ride.

In both [my films], there is something about the nighttime. For a while I was like, "They're not horror films, they're Halloween films." Halloween is such a trans obsession because it's this night when reality gives way to something else, something that's darker-tinged and magical in this nocturnal way.

The work is definitely engaged with tropes of horror in the sense that the thing that it's speaking to is grotesque as much as it's beautiful. I think that that is a reflection of a certain gaze on growing up in the suburbs as a trans person. There's something sinister about it that I have sensitivity to, and so that underbelly is expressed in the work in ways that can feel, to the naked eye, like tropes of the horror movie.

I think people have quite conservative connotations with what they're expecting from an A24 horror movie. I can't worry too much about that when I'm making the thing. It's definitely not my job, as I have seen it for myself, to satisfy the expectations of some genre. That's just so far from what inspires the work. Although someday I do want to make a horror movie where the intention is to just scare you and make you feel bad.

When people have asked me if the film is “scary” or not, my response has been that it depends on how attuned their life experience has made them to certain existential, psychic horrors.

The horror in [my] movies tends to be this invisible, internal horror. They're not running from something; the thing is inside them.

The first thing that I said to the crew when we had our production meeting was, "I want to make a movie that plays at the IFC Center at midnight for the next 20 years." So many of the movies that have lasted in my life are not straightforward, scary, roller coaster ride movies. They're midnight movies. They take place in this dark underworld, and play best at that hour when you're not supposed to be awake. The thing that they're doing is pulling the rug of waking life out from under you. It can feel scary, but also beautiful and comforting.

In what other ways would you say World’s Fair and TV Glow are in conversation with each other?

I think of World's Fair, TV Glow, and then this other thing that hasn't come out yet as a trilogy. I call it my Screen Trilogy. I kind of stumbled into it a bit with World's Fair; the potency of screen as metaphor for the ways in which identity can feel diffuse, especially in queer and trans experience. World's Fair is a film about searching for yourself in the screen and in fiction before you're ready to do that work in your real life. TV Glow isn't about entering the screen or about actually transitioning, [but] about realizing the need to do so, and recontextualizing your relationship to reality and identity through that realization. And then the next thing will be about everything that happens afterwards; about becoming yourself, and about the actual process of closing that gap between you as spectator and the thing on the screen as experience.

In terms of forthcoming projects and beyond, how are you feeling about the future? As more opportunities and resources come, what do you aspire to build/maintain, or conversely, what do you hope to challenge/resist?

I really want to live a long time. [Laughs] I've recently decided that's one of the most radical things I could do, is have a long life and make a lot of things, and also have a healthy life as a trans person in the public eye.

So much of last year was preparation for this film to come out and [for me to be] in public in a way that is pretty rare and treacherous for trans people in this country. I've built a life that I love, which is a thing that really could only happen after transition, I have queer family, I have home, I have partners who I love and who love me, I have a support system, and a life that I can exist in outside of this mediated existence in public. [I have a life] that is comfortable, and more than comfortable; is enriching, and makes me feel like myself.

I've come to understand that as the base level that any other work I'm trying to do needs to exist in interaction with, because without that, all of the rest of it very quickly becomes unhealthy. Making work as personal as the work that I make, and being as in front of the work as I want to be, in these capitalist spaces, is a mindfuck. A mindfuck that I believe in doing, because I believe in the work.

I'm not so interested in any more glass ceilings that I could break. Which isn't to say that I won't jump up in scope from here, but [after] climbing the mountain of, “I made this tiny movie in the woods and holy shit, now I'm making this big A24 movie,” and having done it, I don't need to prove that to myself again.

I have so many things I want to do and talk about. I have the new script that I'm hoping to make really soon. I wrote a novel last year that I want to adapt into something really epic. I have a lot of other things that I want to make. It's about creating structure and stability for myself to continue to do that work in a way that's healthy and beautiful.

Originally Appeared on GQ