With the horror genre as the ideal narrative vehicle, director Jane Schoenbrun brilliantly explores gender dysphoria and its relationship to the dread associated with awareness of one’s own mortality. The protagonist feels it, and you certainly will too.
The film opens with a shot down the middle of an empty suburban street, with the camera hovering inches above incomprehensible scribbles scrawled in neon pink chalk. At the top of the cul-de-sac, although distant, idles the unmistakable silhouette of an ice cream truck. Backlit with an eerie glow, the hallmark of bygone childhood summers stirs unease with the absence of children. In many ways, this is a film about the absence of one’s self and time’s unceasing forward march. There is a mourning process that comes along with the lost potential of an identity never explored—or yet to be explored.
Director Jane Schoenbrun follows We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) with another critical horror film viscerally illustrating the discomfort of self-exploration through the horror genre. With incredible artistic insight and distinctly queer themes, I Saw the TV Glow (2024) is essential to both horror and queer cinema.
I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen, asthmatic and taciturn, through his formative relationship with a young-adult sci-fi television series redolent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show is called The Pink Opaque, undoubtedly a nod to the Cocteau Twins’s ethereal compilation album of the same name. The two share in common the imagery of moon phases, a suggestion of transitory states, the swinging of a tentative pendulum. In I Saw the TV Glow, Owen waxes and wanes between his dull current reality and the ideal reality he is terrified of.
As a pre-teen, Owen meets Maddy, a fellow outsider who happens to be deeply invested in The Pink Opaque, a show Owen has dreamed of watching. When she invites him to watch it with her, he dives into a new world that envelopes his own. The series protagonists are teenage girls Tara and Isabel, who forge a psychic bond that allows them to meet in the Midnight Realm. Here, they confront the evils cast their way by Mr. Melancholy, the man in the moon. Maddy identifies herself in Tara, and Owen quietly assumes Isabel’s role in ecstatic bursts as he flickers between realities. The blurring realities creates a sense of dysphoria for both Owen and the viewers Schoebrun skillfully convinces to hope that Owen fills Isabel’s shoes. Given only brief glimpses, we want to see more of Owen’s potential reality.
Even with monsters abound, Owen catches glimpses of a reality that is, in many ways, less terrifying than the one occupied by his dying mother and a father characterized by a single condescending line: “Isn’t that a show for girls?” Whereas Maddy embraces escapism and opts out of reality, Owen struggles against the version of himself he yearns to be: the girl this show was written for.
Several years after The Pink Opaque was not renewed for a sixth season, Owen returns to the show in his adulthood but finds he has outgrown it. Terrifying villains and high-stakes scenarios become self-parodying and cliche. He has lost access to Isabel, the version of himself that he buried when the show ended.
At the very end of the film, Owen struggles to breathe after attempting to visit the Midnight Realm for what feels like one final time. Is he having another asthma attack, or is she asphyxiating in soil? The audience feels the hole inside themselves as Owen’s fills with dirt. The dread of an empty future is palpable. When the pendulum swings, you feel that everything is too late. You can visit the past, but no one is there. Not even you. In the future, there is only dirt. Unless you decide to act.
While it explores themes of nostalgia and juxtaposes teenage discomfort with adult dread, I Saw the TV Glow is about being an egg. That is, the pre-transition, pre-acceptance stage of embracing one’s transgender identity. This is not a horror movie rife with cheap jump-scares and anxious anticipation; it is a film that penetrates the psyche. As the credits roll, you will be filled with the horrifying sense that although there is still time to be who you want to be—there can still be a season six, an opportunity for renewal—time is running out.
I can’t really describe it but the way I felt robbed that “The Pink Opaque” wasn’t actually a real show stuck with me for weeks after watching it the first time. Like my older siblings got to stay up late and watch a show that I didn’t. I’ve never had a movie have that effect on me before, it’s wild.