Horror has been off to a slow start in 2024. I liked the prehistoric thriller Out of Darkness. I had a lot of fun over on Shudder, watching the fleet-footed French spider-invasion movie Infested (trust me). One has had to look for effective scares, but it’s a pleasure to hit pay dirt. And nothing this year has haunted me quite like I Saw the TV Glow, a surrealist story of two suburban teenagers obsessed with a cult 1990s TV show. It opens in theaters this weekend.
There’s a catch, though. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature is not, strictly speaking, horror (nor was their debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—which also unsettled me when I saw it in 2022—about an internet-obsessed teen). There should be a word for what I Saw the TV Glow is—Lynchian, perhaps. Like Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, this is eerie, yearning, piercingly nostalgic indie filmmaking, a vivid account of youthful alienation full of luridly beautiful, and sometimes extremely alarming, images that you will find hard to shake.
We start on a quiet street, luminescent chalk scrawled on the asphalt, an ice cream truck glowing strangely in the distance. It is 1996, and seventh grader Owen lives his life in a state of pained disassociation—typically in the radiance of his family TV. When he notices a ninth-grade girl named Maddy reading a paperback episode guide to a TV show called The Pink Opaque, something cracks ever-so-slightly open within him.
The Pink Opaque is a late-night TV show that airs on a network like Nickelodeon or The CW, and it’s a kind of amalgam of Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about two girls fighting monsters sent by an evil force called Mr. Melancholy. “It’s way too scary, and the mythology is way too complicated for most kids,” Maddy tells Owen protectively. But she invites Owen to her house to watch an episode with her, and a fixation develops, as well as a strange bond between the two. As the film cuts between the cheap, slightly scary footage of the show and the teenagers watching it, Schoenbrun captures an uncanny alchemy: that thing that happens when a lonely young person finds something niche and weird and out of the mainstream that tells them who they are.
Owen and Maddy—played by the actors Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine—are also probably queer (strongly hinted at throughout), and the bumps and shocks of their adolescence have made them unusually susceptible. TV Glow brilliantly mixes nostalgia with foreboding and a pervasive sense of loss (and music, too, which is excellent: the score is by Alex G; Phoebe Bridgers makes a cameo performing at a bar; and Lindsay Jordan, a.k.a. Snail Mail, is one of the leads on The Pink Opaque). The second half of the movie, which jumps ahead in time by two years, then nine years, then 20, shows how dislocating Owen and Maddy’s obsession has been, and the most nightmarish moments in the movie are also the most ambiguous—visions of derangement that come from loving something, and two people discovering their identities even as their reality slips away.
I was bothered by a couple of moments where the movie felt a bit underwritten, almost improvisational, with dreamlike sequences that were more about vibes than lucid storytelling, but the way the film builds and works on your nerves is something. The ending sequence, with an adult Owen beset by disappointment and a bottled sense of self, is scary and explosive. You leave TV Glow wanting to see it again.
