Life-Affirming Horror and the Films of Jane Schoenbrun

The past fifteen years have been a watershed for horror cinema, as the genre—previously dominated by cis white men—expanded under the influence of an international coterie of minoritized filmmakers. From Jordan Peele to Stewart Thorndike, Julia Ducournau, and Jeff Barnaby, these diverse creators have embraced horror narratives and iconography to explore the complex relations between race, gender, desire, and identity. Horror directors have long exploited these topics in their pursuit of sensation, but these emerging auteurs are confronting the genre’s racist, misogynist, and homo- and transphobic past in incisive and reflexive ways. Drawing on a countertradition that includes modern classics like The Velvet Vampire (Stephanie Rothman, 1971) and Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973), these innovative, formerly marginalized filmmakers are broadening audiences’ expectations of what horror can do rhetorically and affectively.

Jane Schoenbrun has recently emerged as another important innovator exploring the expressive power of horror media for both creators and consumers. Their trilogy of films about horror media—A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018), We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), and I Saw the TV Glow (2024)—collectively elucidate how “fiction and reality [can] bleed together in compelling, sometimes disturbing ways,” particularly for marginalized fans.¹ Such an ars poetica is one reason Schoenbrun is among the most celebrated trans filmmakers working today. Trans cinema theorists have already analyzed and will continue to analyze how Schoenbrun’s films reflect trans experience and aesthetics.² As a horror scholar, I hope to complement such work by analyzing the films’ relation to horror media, how they collectively proclaim horror’s value for its trans, queer, and otherwise vulnerable fans.

Schoenbrun’s most widely distributed film, I Saw the TV Glow, has already been hailed for its celebration of queer and trans fandom; many trans fans of the film appreciate how its gender-nonconforming protagonists find themselves through the permeable boundaries between lived reality and media fantasy.³ But to truly appreciate the trans and queer world-building of I Saw the TV Glow, one must see it in the context of Schoenbrun’s earlier features, which also celebrate the life-giving and community-generating power of horror media. Collectively, A Self-Induced Hallucination, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and I Saw the TV Glow demonstrate three fundamental truths about horror media, horror fandom, and their utility: (1) Horror creates community; (2) Horror provides a means of processing reality; and (3) Horror helps its fans manage the difficulty of self-discovery. Schoenbrun’s films extol horror’s life-affirming functions, which are often overlooked in critiques of its morbidity and pathologizations of its fans.

Each of Schoenbrun’s movies features a work of horror fiction that empowers and enables the fans who interact with it. The archival documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination consists entirely of YouTube videos about Slenderman: the faceless, betentacled, and besuited internet boogeyman created by Eric Knudsen in 2009.⁴ Fans of Knudsen’s original Slenderman photos quickly began posting videos, short stories, and other media about Slenderman online, creating a coauthored mythology. Many of these stories and videos were made in response to other Slenderman works, resulting in a dense network of artistic exchange. A Self-Induced Hallucination illustrates how embracing Slenderman provides fan-creators with entrée into a sympathetic online community.

The allure of online horror is also the subject of Schoenbrun’s second film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. It follows a young woman called Casey (Anna Cobb) as she partakes in the World’s Fair Challenge, an act of ritualized internet spectatorship that allegedly induces uncanny bodily changes in participants. Like Slenderman, the World’s Fair Challenge seems to be a community-generated (and generating) horror fantasy that can be both threatening to and supportive of community members. While posting videos about her nascent metamorphosis, Casey attracts the attention of the mysterious JLB (Michael J. Rogers), a World’s Fair Challenge devotee who becomes preoccupied with protecting her. Casey at first entertains his concerns but eventually rebuffs them when they start to feel paternalistic. The final third of the film shifts from her perspective to his, revealing JLB to be a melancholic middle-aged man. Although it’s plausible to interpret JLB as an ambiguous figure with mixed motives, his narrative encapsulates the common need to feel important to someone. JLB’s character captures the quest for connection at the heart of online horror communities, while Casey’s dramatizes “the point of view of someone for whom changing their body is a necessity.”⁵

I Saw the TV Glow likewise attends to how horror media help fans understand themselves but shifts its focus from internet culture to television. Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Owen (Ian Foreman and, when older, Justice Smith) meet as teenagers in the mid-1990s and quickly bond over their shared enthusiasm for The Pink Opaque, a late-night teen series modeled on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–3). Identifying with The Pink Opaque’s heroines, Tara and Isabel (Lindsey Jordan and Helena Howard), provides Maddie and Owen with context to begin exploring their queer and trans identities—until Maddy runs away, leaving Owen with the show but no one to process it with.

Even before Maddy leaves, clues within the film’s mise-en-scène and framing hint that The Pink Opaque’s universe overlaps with Maddy and Owen’s. Eventually she returns to inform Owen that they are in fact Tara and Isabel, and that the world Owen thinks of as reality is actually a hallucination created by Tara and Isabel’s arch nemesis, Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner), to distract them while they slowly suffocate. Maddy offers Owen a chance to escape this trap, to commit suicide within the hallucination so as to wake up as Isabel in the real world (i.e., The Pink Opaque).

I Saw the TV Glow is by far the most ontologically complex of Schoenbrun’s films; one must, for instance, pay close attention to changes in aspect ratio to apprehend The Pink Opaque as the film’s true reality.⁶ Yet the significance of its horror iconography does not fully emerge until and unless one contextualizes it within Schoenbrun’s trilogy. Read in concert with A Self-Induced Hallucination and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow becomes not only a narrative about the “‘egg-crack’ . . . moment a person realizes they are trans” but also a powerful celebration of horror media’s life-affirming, community-generating power.⁷

The first principle of Schoenbrun’s trilogy, the first fundamental truth of horror media that their ars poetica conveys, is that horror creates community. Of course, horror media have long been accused of inspiring destructive communities—the latest Scream sequel (Scream VI, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2023) being just one recent, self-referential example of that cliché. Schoenbrun acknowledges this possibility in both A Self-Induced Hallucination and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, but they focus primarily on the benefits of horror fandom. For instance, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair never shows Casey talking with anyone in person; her only interpersonal interactions are online and related to the World’s Fair Challenge.

Skeptics might point out that the film is substantially composed of online videos and Skype calls, but its first third actually contains many scenes of Casey at home or wandering through her hometown. In all of these she is alone, creating the impression that Casey embraces the World’s Fair Challenge in order to find online the community she cannot find locally. A Self-Induced Hallucination, meanwhile, is actually a record of a community and the “open-source legend” they developed together.⁸ Through “Slender series” (fictional narratives about Slenderman), recorded rants, and explainer, debunker, and reaction videos, fans cocreate and adjudicate the Slenderman canon. Schoenbrun’s film even includes a video of several creators getting together to spot clips from their videos within the HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman (Irene Taylor Brodsky, 2016).

In I Saw the TV Glow, television and the desire for it are what bring Maddy and Owen together. They meet on election night 1996, in the cafeteria of the aptly named Void High School (VHS), where Maddy is reading an episode guide to The Pink Opaque. Owen has seen ads for the show but is not allowed to watch it; their desire to know it better fuels their desire to know Maddy too.⁹ Sitting with Maddy on the cafeteria floor, Owen seems to recognize The Pink Opaque as a portal into another life—a prototrans life, one might say, in that Owen’s desire to read about a show they’ve never seen carries the urgency of imagining themself into a transformative reality. When Owen finally watches The Pink Opaque during a clandestine sleepover at Maddy’s house, a head-on reaction shot marks their experience as transcendent. Bathed in pink light, Owen sits, mouth slightly agape, in communion with not only The Pink Opaque but also Maddy and her friend Amanda. When Owen is unable to watch the show live, Maddy records it on VHS for them. Television thus keeps Owen in touch with their community—and nascent gender dysphoria—even when they cannot connect in person.¹⁰

The second principle of horror media that Schoenbrun’s trilogy imparts is that horror provides a means of processing reality, a set of cognitive strategies for making sense of the world and one’s experience of it. This dynamic contributes to horror’s historic popularity among teenage audiences, but it has value for older fans as well. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, JLB uses the World’s Fair Challenge to reframe his social isolation as heroism. JLB understands the World’s Fair Challenge as an open-source MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and his relationship with Casey affirms him as an “expert” within the game, one who does not undertake the challenge himself but guides others through their metamorphoses. His increasingly patronizing tone ultimately alienates Casey, however, leading her to terminate their relationship. At that juncture, JLB becomes the film’s main character. For the first time, viewers see him not as an on-screen avatar but hunched over a computer in his depressingly juvenile bedroom. The camera pans across toys and other childhood memorabilia as JLB exits the room, then follows him as he wanders his generic, otherwise uninhabited McMansion—a formal gesture that may encourage the viewer to pity him.

Then, at some undefined point in the future, JLB narrates a story about Casey forgiving him and meeting him in Manhattan to thank him for preventing her from going too far with the challenge. This concluding portion of this monologue is shot from the perspective of JLB’s webcam, and after he finishes speaking the camera stays with him for another forty-five seconds while he contemplates the tale he’s told. It’s unclear whether the story is true—this viewer suspects not—but it seems to give JLB peace. A small smile comes to his face in the final seconds before the film cuts to black, suggesting to this viewer that the World’s Fair Challenge and his story about Casey allow JLB to recontextualize his loneliness as that of the Good Samaritan and thereby assuage it. Some audiences interpret JLB’s smile differently, however: as evidence of malicious intent rather than private comfort. Yet there is no evidence in the film of JLB attempting to groom or otherwise endanger Casey; indeed, his story suggests a desire for gratitude: to be perceived as helpful, and thus socially significant, by someone somewhere.

Like the World’s Fair Challenge, The Pink Opaque helps Maddy and Owen manage painful disjunctions between their personal truths and social realities, albeit to varying degrees of resolution. The first time Maddy watches The Pink Opaque with Owen, she expresses a homoerotic admiration for Tara’s butch confidence that suggests both desire and identification. Two years later, when Owen seeks her out to reestablish their friendship, Maddy is able to say with confidence, “I like girls,” thus claiming her queerness independent of her fandom. Owen is still parsing—or rather afraid to parse—their gender and sexual identities, but television gives the teens a vocabulary to work with. Owen tells Maddy, “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I know there’s nothing in there, but I am still too nervous to open myself up and check.” To this she replies, “Maybe you’re like Isabel: afraid of what’s inside you.” Using Isabel’s timidity as a metaphor for Owen’s gender incongruity enables Maddy to engage “the speculative promise of trans* as a prepositional element that asks us to go ‘over, across, beyond, through, outside, on the farther side of’ the thing denoted, destabilizing the point of origin from which we might imagine such a departure.”¹¹ Eventually an adult Owen will look inside, cleaving their chest and abdomen with a box cutter before pulling the incision open to reveal the incandescent glow of a television monitor. Facing their inner light in a mirror, Owen smiles briefly before their face becomes a rictus of ambivalence: they’ve opened themself up but are not yet ready to act on what they see (i.e., Isabel’s womanhood). Owen’s otherworldly incision recalls the body horror of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), in which mergers of technology and tissue empower characters to become “the New Flesh.” Schoenbrun’s intertextual allusion confirms Cronenberg’s theory that media technologies terrify precisely because they reveal different potentialities for being human.

A Self-Induced Hallucination provides the foundation for understanding both JLB’s and Owen’s mediated self-processing because it documents how horror media help people manage distressing environments and emotions. Toward the end of the film, Schoenbrun samples multiple video rants and vlogs in which Slenderman creators speak to the legend’s healing powers. One enthusiast calls his Slenderman art “my outlet,” while others aver that Slenderman helps them manage their loneliness and social anxiety. Multiple fans claim Slenderman as a tulpa, or an autonomous consciousness living within its creator’s body. Later, a teen describes how creating a tulpa helped him manage his family’s frequent relocations and his parents’ homophobia. Psychiatry professor Samuel Veissière clarifies that these “tulpamancers” are not psychotic; rather, their belief in tulpas helps them function within a reality that pains them.¹²

The final truth of horror media that Schoenbrun explores in their trilogy is that horror helps its fans navigate the stress of self-discovery. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Casey explores bodily transformation by participating in an alternative-reality horror game that involves both watching other players’ metamorphosis videos and creating her own. The challenge itself consists of little more than pricking one’s finger, smearing blood over an online flicker video, and repeating “We are all going to the world’s fair” three times. But players’ transformation videos tend to resemble body horror films and feature all kinds of transfiguration. One young man documents a growing patch of green scabs on his arm, out of which he eventually extracts a strip of fun-fair admission tickets. Another player silently flaunts the “demon wings” they’ve grown. Casey’s metamorphosis remains largely internal, manifesting itself most intensely in a creepy video of her destroying a beloved childhood toy. Still, the fact that she is working through something comes across very convincingly. What that something is is never clarified, despite Casey’s eventual admission that the World’s Fair Challenge is a hoax: “The video is a fake. But so is all of this. What does that make the video?” It makes the video cathartic, an outlet through which to release anxieties yet unnamed.¹³

A Self-Induced Hallucination likewise honors the ways that horror media help fans manage personal crises. Additional videos demonstrate how Slenderman creators use the legend to identify and dispute insidious stigmas, such as the idea that consuming horror leads individuals to commit violent acts. Horror communities provide occasions and vocabularies for fans to report and refute personal encounters with such hostile rhetoric, as one sees in clips of one young adult who forcefully asserts that their love of horror is unrelated to their mental-health issues and suicide attempts, that indeed horror helps them manage those challenges.

But nowhere is the remedial value of horror media made clearer than in the climax of I Saw the TV Glow, when Isabel/Owen finally meets Mr. Melancholy. Their encounter constitutes The Pink Opaque’s season 5 finale, the last episode ever broadcast. It begins in Academy aspect ratio, as befits a 1998 television program. Mr. Melancholy’s stooges have kidnapped Tara and Isabel, excised their hearts, and poisoned them before burying them alive. Owen narrates these developments until the arrival of Mr. Melancholy, a demonic man in the moon whose face resembles an ever-fluctuating caseous mask that quickly fills the entire frame. His image is based on the pockmarked moon face from the Smashing Pumpkins’ music video “Tonight, Tonight” (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 1996), which was itself based on the moon man of Georges Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune (1902). Mr. Melancholy’s ominous visage pulsates as he tells Isabel, “Don’t fight it. Let my poison work its magic. Soon you won’t remember anything: your real name, your superpowers, your heart. You won’t even remember that you’re dying!” Isabel gasps for air, as Owen gasps for air during their many asthma attacks. Mr. Melancholy is indeed speaking to Owen as well, for as he talks the frame expands into the wide-screen aspect ratio that denotes Owen’s reality. Owen and Isabel’s mutual pulmonary distress confirms their connection even as it also manifests the stress of staying in the closet for Owen. Owen’s asthma indicates that they are dying within their male socialization, just as Isabel is asphyxiating underground. Horror media thus allow Schoenbrun to figure the violence of cisheteropatriarchy, even if their protagonists cannot defeat it.

By celebrating and elevating horror media, Jane Schoenbrun has emerged as one of the most genre-savvy, trans-affirming filmmakers of the twenty-first century. Unlike many auteurs working in the horror genre, Schoenbrun works on the horror genre, which is to say that their films explore how horror functions as a technology for living for its fans. Peele, Thorndike, Ducournau, and Barnaby also provide narratives, iconography, and soundscapes that help viewers manage alienation, distress, and loneliness. With few exceptions, however, their films are not about the community or self-knowledge that horror media enable. Schoenbrun elevates horror by helping fans understand what it does for them, and for that this fan remains truly grateful.