A24’s Latest Horror Sensation Is a Treasure Trove for Buffy Fans

There was no movie at Sundance I was looking forward to seeing more than Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, and there was no movie about which I was more anxious. Schoenbrun’s first feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was one of the most striking debuts of the 2021 festival, an eerie mood piece inspired by internet creepypasta built around a mesmerizing turn from newcomer Anna Cobb. But the movie was so sui generis that it wasn’t clear what Schoenbrun could possibly do for an encore. Could Schoenbrun possibly replicate the off-kilter magnetism of Cobb’s untutored performance with the star of Detective Pikachu? And how could the followup possibly pack the fortuitous charge of World’s Fair, a movie about getting lost down internet rabbit holes that had the fortune to premiere during Sundance’s first all-virtual festival?

As it turns out, the anticipation was warranted, and the worries were for naught. I Saw the TV Glow is a confident leap forward that retains the handmade quality of World’s Fair while putting the advantages of an A24 budget to eye-popping use. Like its predecessor, TV Glow is the story of young people obsessed with a cultural phenomenon, in this case a cult ’90s TV show called The Pink Opaque. It’s also an allegory of trans awakening, and presumably the first to be heavily inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “This is a movie about the egg-crack,” Schoenbrun, who started hormone therapy shortly before shooting began, explained at the film’s premiere.

Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, in a star-making performance) meet in a high school gym during the 1996 election, when the two-year age gap between them seems unbridgeable: When he tells her he’s in seventh grade, she responds, with all the wisdom a ninth grader can muster, “You’re a baby.” But he’s intrigued by the book she’s reading, the official episode guide to The Pink Opaque, and, in the soft light of a Fruitopia vending machine, she inducts him into the secret society of fans. The show, she tells him, airs at 10:30 on Saturday nights, the last and least desirable time slot before the Young Adult Network switches to black-and-white reruns for old people. It’s the story of two girls, played by Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan (aka indie rocker Snail Mail), who discover that they have the ability to connect with each other on the astral plane—and the duty to battle a moon-faced “Big Bad” named Mr. Melancholy. Maddy, who talks like she’s spent countless hours in the Television Without Pity forums, gently scoffs when Owen confuses “monster of the week” stories with deep mythology episodes, but when she learns that Owen’s parents won’t let him stay up late enough to watch the show, she starts recording reruns and leaving VHS tapes for him at school, each cassette embellished with intricate doodles as if it were a medieval manuscript.

The Pink Opaque is a mélange of ’90s TV touchstones, including The X-Files, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and Twin Peaks. But it’s a treasure trove for Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, with more Easter eggs (cracked and otherwise) than one could catch in a single viewing. The show features a weekly lineup of bands playing at the local rock club, an obvious analogue for Buffy’s Bronze, even though the vibe is closer to the apocalyptic decadence of Twin Peaks: The Return’s Roadhouse. Its supernatural storyline is transparently structured as a (sometimes on-the-nose) allegory of teenage girlhood, and when the movie shows us the opening credits of one episode, they’re in the instantly recognizable Buffy font. (There’s also an especially fitting cameo by a member of the Buffy cast.) Schoenbrun, who put A24’s money to work commissioning 16 bands to record songs for the soundtrack, gave them the prompt, “I want you to write the song you would have played if you had shown up on Buffy in Season 3.”

Owen and Maddy build their friendship and their identities around The Pink Opaque, even though his taciturn stepfather (played by none other than Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst) asks him, “Isn’t that a show for girls?” And then, like so many cult favorites, it’s just gone, canceled with no warning or resolution. The show has been a lifeline for these suburban misfits, a portal to another world, and now it’s closed, leaving its fans with five seasons of devotion and nowhere to put it. Buffy didn’t end after five seasons, but it did switch networks after a “CW series finale” that ended with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s slayer sacrificing her life to save the world. If you weren’t sufficiently plugged in to the still-growing internet, you could easily have thought that was really it—that five years of fighting evil simply ended with our heroine dead and in the ground.

Understanding that you’re trans, Schoenbrun explained after the screening, can come as a similarly dislocating shock. “That realization, if you’re going to actually do something with that knowledge, it’s going to be like burying yourself alive,” they said. Although there’s no explicit gender dysphoria in I Saw the TV Glow, there is plenty of ego death on both sides of the screen, and the prevailing sense that allowing a new self to emerge sometimes entails a sharp break with the old one. The Pink Opaque is a vessel for Owen and Maddy to imagine a different world, one where their reality is not bound by the limitations of their physical bodies—a hyperbolized version of the suburban teenager’s wish to somehow, some way, be anywhere else. But the prospect of liberation is also a terrifying one. Although Schoenbrun’s movies have been loosely categorized as horror, they’re driven more by a profound sense of the uncanny than a rush to the next jump scare. I Saw the TV Glow is unnerving, unsettling, and engrossing, the kind of movie best watched on the border between waking and sleep. (Schoenbrun said their dream was to make “a movie that can play midnights at the IFC Center for 20 or 30 years.”) The day after, I’m still not sure I didn’t dream the whole thing.