“Traditionally in the horror genre, I think that the monster, the dread, the danger, the horror is something external, right? It’s like we’re running from the monster. The monster has been unleashed, and it’s coming for us, and we need to get away,” Schoenbrun said. “Whereas in my films, if there is a horror element to it, it’s very internal and it’s very subliminal, and in ‘World’s Fair,’ it’s this force inside Casey that might not even be real. In ‘I Saw the TV Glow,’ it’s this thing that Owen is hiding from that’s essentially killing him slowly from the inside. And I think this feels like an accurate way to talk about my own experience of dysphoria, which is very ambient and very subliminal until you break and scream at the top of your lungs at a child’s birthday party in an arcade.”
Which is exactly what happens in “I Saw the TV Glow,” and it was through making “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” that Schoenbrun began to understand their own trans identity more clearly. In that sense, the new film is their most autobiographical, as the dread-filled experience of gender dysphoria becomes the movie’s horror aesthetic.
“I think that we’re so used to expressions of transness in film that are fully externalized, right? It’s all about the external image. It’s all about looking in a mirror, and the mirror is cracked maybe, and you don’t feel like yourself, and you’ve always just wanted to be a beautiful woman, but you’re in a man’s body. This is just so far from my own pre-transition experience. I avoided mirrors, in fact, because I was hiding from myself, and the way that I hid from myself manifested in all of these unconscious ways and in all of these coping mechanisms that had so much more to do with this subtle, almost tonal sense that something was unreal or wrong or passing me by, this ghostly quality of life,” Schoenbrun said.
The filmmaker continued, “So when I am making a movie about that, or in the future when I make a movie about healing from that, it only makes sense for it to be sort of imbued in the language of the film as a whole, tone, rhythm, the way time works in the movies, the aesthetics of liminality and of this sort of fuzziness of whatever it might be, static, analog, low-quality internet video. All of these feel to me like more truthful expressions of that feeling of unreality that we call dysphoria than a more direct and externalized expression of it.”
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