Quick Links 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.
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.
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?
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?
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.