I Saw The TV Glow Filmmaker On Using ’90s Nostalgia As Queer Allegory [SXSW]

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In an age where nostalgia is at its height, I Saw The TV Glow is a new horror film set in the 1990s that looks at the influence of media on impressionable teenagers. Using their own experience as a teenager in the ’90s, and the analog fandoms and television of that decade they participated in at the time, writer and director Jane Schoenbrun converts the film into a coming-out metaphor. The movie taps into the memories of ’90s kids who were often left unsettled and sleepless after Nickelodeon shows like the anthology Are You Afraid of the Dark? or even the silly and absurd, Salute Your Shorts.

Starring Justice Smith and Bridgette Lundy-Paine, I Saw The TV Glow will be released by A24 in theaters in the US on May 3, 2024. Owen (Smith) is just a teenager trying to survive the 1990s in the suburbs. When his classmate Maddy (Lundy-Paine) introduces him to a late-night TV show full of mystery and unease, that reveals a vision of a supernatural world lurking beneath the one they inhabit. Owen’s own belief in his own reality begins to crack in that subtle glow of the television. “The Pink Opaque” is a cult TV show that will challenge his own understanding of who he is and where he belongs in the world.

Screen Rant spoke to Schoenbrun at the SXSW Festival, where they were promoting I Saw The TV Glow. They discuss how the film sprang from their own childhood while using the language of film as a queer allegory to express the overwhelming experience of transitioning as an adult.

I Saw The TV Glow Is An Auteur’s Tale Of A “Childhood That Doesn’t Feel Quite Right”

Screen Rant: Tell us about the origins of I Saw The TV Glow. This is about teenagers who discover much about themselves through a portal of a cultish late-night TV show.

Jane Schoenbrun: Yeah. It’s about these two kids who are outcasts in their suburban hometown in the nineties. The place where they feel most at home is in front of the television watching this TV show that is this ’90s phenomenon that I think still exists today, but definitely the heyday of it was back then. These TV teens fight monsters and save the world, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or a Goosebumps energy.

These kids really love this show, and they really relate to the characters in the show. But their love for it is so intense that it’s almost like a coping mechanism for getting through a childhood that doesn’t feel quite right. Then the show gets canceled. One of the two of them disappears without a trace, and the film jumps ahead to adulthood. And it becomes something that’s maybe a little more sinister or almost supernatural as we unravel the mystery of this person’s disappearance as it relates to the TV show.

I’m a queer trans filmmaker. It’s my second feature film. My first feature film, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, which premiered at Sundance a couple of years ago, was similarly about people finding themselves through fiction; through horror and genre. And this film is very much an extension of that film’s themes and ideas, about people who don’t feel the world that they exist within is quite real or quite right.

I wrote it while I was beginning to transition my gender, and I think the film very much comes from trying to articulate not only that feeling of early transition as an overwhelming emotional experience but also everything that led up to it. It’s half of a life spent knowing that something is wrong subliminally and looking for the language to explain why. But it’s exploring these queer themes in genre terms, like my films tend to do.

It’s getting such a passionate response from the festivals it’s played thus far. There are a lot of people out there seeing themselves in these characters. You talked about how personal it was to you. In the writing of it, are you talking to other people who transitioned to crowdsource experiences at all or did you just maintain your own truth?

Jane Schoenbrun: No, I consider myself an auteur, so I tend to be a little bit of a control freak in the creating of the idea. I think my internal barometer is never “make sure [others agree].” I try to stay away from thinking about representation; good representation or bad representation. I think that’s too much pressure to have on your shoulders when you’re trying to make honest art.

As a queer and trans filmmaker, obviously, there aren’t a lot of folks making movies from that background and from that perspective. I do feel a responsibility to do it well. But in my experience, the best way to make good art from an honest place is just to trust what feels drawn from something personal. I tend to just hold myself to the standard of, “Am I exploring something with this film that I know emotionally is coming from a really vulnerable place?”

I think the author Dennis Johnson always says, “Write naked.” Trying to put things on the screen that feel scary to say out loud. And if the films resonate with other people, it’s exactly because they’re not crowdsourced. They’re personal and vulnerable in this way that has to come from an internal process.

How Buffy The Vampire Slayer & More Inspired I Saw The TV Glow

I love that you use this cultishly adored TV show as the reference point, like Buffy and Goosebumps. In the writing process, did you revisit those? Did you spend a lot of time with those shows? And how did they help inspire this specific tale?

Jane Schoenbrun: I think I tried to work from memory. I definitely did peek back at some of my favorite Nickelodeon TV shows of my childhood, but I think it was much more a process of trying to capture the feeling — not so much of how they look when you put on an old episode on YouTube of Are You Afraid Of The Dark in 2024, and just can see it from the vantage point of, “It’s so dated, it’s so cheesy, it’s so cheap,” — but more so thinking about how it felt to be eight years old and seeing something that just took you to another world in childhood.

Growing up in the suburbs, growing up queer, growing up quite disassociated from the real world surrounding me — I put so much of myself and so much love into the screen; into my relationship with these stories that I was watching on a screen. And I imbued them with such magic as a kid that I would always say with this film, “We’re not trying to make a movie about how those shows actually looked. We’re trying to make a movie about how it felt to watch them in that time and that place.”

I think it was much more of an intuitive process of what shines through in your memory, and borrowing various devices or tropes or aesthetics that just seem so drawn from that teens fight monsters sub-genre of ’90s television. But then I’m almost adapting or re-contextualizing a lot of those tropes into a contemporary art film vernacular. It’s something I also tried to do with my first film, by taking internet aesthetics and combining them with the language of a contemporary art film.

I think something really weird and uncanny happens when you take something that we think of as this cheesy, old, dated genre and try to take it really seriously in a vernacular that we still can understand as articulating a very different aesthetic.

Did you have any cinematic reference points? I’ve heard early comparisons to Donnie Darko and The Craft. Were those reference points for you at all?

Jane Schoenbrun: I’m always down for The Craft comparison. I’m a cinephile and a film nerd and a film snob, and I try to pull from everywhere. I think I love slow cinema, and there is definitely a lot of language in the film that I’m borrowing from Gus Van Sant in the 2000s or Gregg Araki in the ’90s whose queer teen films are a very specific aesthetic that’s always resonated with me.

I think I definitely did know also with this film that I was setting out to make what I would call a teen angst classic. It’s a film with a banger soundtrack and lots of feelings, just like the heart-on-your-sleeve movie that back in the day you would rent from the video store, and then rent eight more times and watch in basements with your friends. Donnie Darko to me is the gold standard of that cult movie waiting in the new releases section for you to discover. I definitely was pulling from a lot of those early 2000s cult movies. There was much more of a culture at the time of digging through the bin to find something that’s a little off the beaten path but could be your new favorite movie.

I Saw The TV Glow Comes With Your Next Favorite Indie Playlist

You teased the soundtrack to this and how integral it is to the film. Tell us a little bit more about the artists you have featured on this one.

Jane Schoenbrun: I pitched A24 on doing a soundtrack that could double as the soundtrack from the TV show within the movie. Because it’s such a big part of those ’90s TV shows, there was always The Bronze on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Peach Pit on Party of Five. Every week for some reason, even though the show would take place in some small town in California, whatever It band of the moment would be in that town playing their new single at the local club.

We basically collaborated on a list of artists, just more emerging, contemporary, mostly queer musicians whose work I really loved. And I spoke with each of them and made each of them a mix and basically said to them, “Write the song that you would’ve played if you had played on one of those TV shows back in the day.” They all read the script, and we talked a lot about the themes of the movie.

I’ve been a mixtape maker from the youngest age. And it was definitely this cool opportunity to make a mixtape from scratch. The songs didn’t exist yet, but I got to work with so many of my favorite artists to create something. People like Caroline Polachek; Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers wrote a song for the film; Yule covers Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl.” Snail Mail, who’s also in the film, does a cover of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight Tonight.” Florist, Lorraine, Bartees Strange… It’s just to me a real treasure trove of some of the most exciting artists getting started today.

Source: Screen Rant Plus