I Saw the TV Glow, A24’s supernatural horror about growing up trans (2024)

The deeply unreliable US-to-UK distribution pipeline may have delayed I Saw the TV Glow’s British release by almost three months, but it transferred a fittingly mythic quality to Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film. It is, like all great art, a kind of creative relay race; a piece of cult art about cult art that has taken cues from other cult art and will doubtless influence future cult art.

Following two isolated teenagers in the late 90s as they bond over a niche fantasy series, I Saw the TV Glow evokes Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Cameos by actors from those series serve as clarifying footnotes of its influences. But sandwiched between ideas around nostalgia and media consumption that have preoccupied (cis) viewers is a slice of cinematic antimatter, a kind of deep and inscrutable existential disquiet around gender and identity never before depicted in any film, let alone a film with this kind of budget or A24 clout.

I Saw the TV Glow is a horror movie by, for and about trans people: an unfathomably strange and bleak fairytale that will be debated and beloved for years to come. Its existence as an unwieldy, confrontational and honest piece of landmark trans cinema is a gift. With this film and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, their earlier, equally haunting tale of life lived through a screen, Schoenbrun has established theirself as a truly singular filmmaker.

Schoenbrun has spent the year promoting I Saw the TV Glow. “The first six months I was like, alright, I’m gonna be a press whor*,” they tell me. They swore off further publicity for the film in June but came out of semi-retirement to speak to Dazed about winning their poker game with Hollywood, the intensity of the film’s ending, and why Flubber is trans.

I’d actually like to start with the ending in the ‘Fun Centre’ – it’s a terrifying, intense note to end on. For trans people, to be older and matured as the wrong gender is just another level of existential nightmare. Can you speak about the energy of that sequence?

Jane Schoenbrun: On a narrative level there was always an idea that the movie started in that parachute and ended in that arcade. In the script the arcade was described as ‘Dave and Buster’s if it was in the ninth circle of hell’. There was something in this visual arc from the candy-coloured, very nostalgic gym class that you can hide in, to the same sort of experience of being surrounded by neon and flashing lights but it being drained of all potential or romance. It’s sort of like you’re an addict and you’ve increased your dose, so you’re almost overdosing on entertainment or nostalgia. The arcade at the end and the parachute at the beginning are sort of mile markers and they mirror Owen’s deterioration.

I think, emotionally, the movie had a pretty earnest goal. I wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna do a trans allegory or a cautionary tale.’ Not so long before sitting down to write the movie I had blown up my entire life by coming out and had the overwhelming emotional experience of finally accepting my identity within myself, which is terrifying and exciting and potentially liberating and potentially life-ending. You’re playing chicken with social death.

This movie was written from within that [experience] and while unpacking everything I was going through I set myself the goal of trying to capture that feeling and the gravitas of that feeling. I remember I went to the cemetery about a week before we started production because I had already been transitioning for a year or two by the time we made the movie and was in a very different place. I was trying to reconnect with that overwhelming feeling – it’s not something I’d recommend doing!

There is this moment about halfway through the movie when they’re in the goth club where, to me, the bottom drops out and we never really recover it. It’s just this absolute descent into overwhelming chaos, from that sequence to the final episode sequence to the planetarium monologue to Owen’s decision to the arcade; it’s a very different tone than the first half. What I was trying to do there wasn’t ‘look at this horrible thing that’s happened to this character’ and more about creating the emotional circ*mstances where you could feel what I felt – this overwhelming sort of terror, but also potential liberation.

I’ve been fascinated by how many cis people have missed the transness. It almost doesn’t feel subtextual, it feels textual. I wonder if a lot of people struggle to digest trans narratives as something abstract and not something literal.

Jane Schoenbrun: I think it’s testament to what I was talking about, right? Just the scarcity of trans people expressing trans narratives in the world and standing behind them. It’s always been a founding principle of my work, following Willow [Catelyn Maclay] and Caden’s [Mark Gardner] work on trans cinema, that we’ve classically represented transness in our cinema as this externalised experience. It’s this person to gawk at or to mourn their passing or be terrified by or weirdly attracted to. It’s never internal, it’s never about the feelings within. And that’s just because we haven’t got to make our own sh*t.

I’m in a weird position because I feel like I have nothing to complain about, I’m making a career out of creating personal art and my life is awesome, mostly. In many senses, I have won my weird poker game with Hollywood – at least for now. But I also get a front row seat to what you’re talking about. On the most basic level it’s a test screening where a bunch of cis people get really excited to me that they don’t understand what’s trans about the film. On the highest level it’s feeling like under everything there’s this invisible double standard of navigating a space where the people in control don’t relate and want to really understand what I’m talking about because it doesn’t fit their experience like an Ari Aster or a Michael Mann or a Christopher Nolan film does, so it’s viewed as wrong or less sexy. That can be frustrating. But I’m also like, I’ve got nothing to complain about compared to all the other trans folks out there who are struggling. It’s like a mission in a way but the art comes first – I don’t make movies to make people understand that trans people are humans with specific kinds of habits. But I do really like the fact that my movies are charting new ground and language creatively to change culture in some way.

Circling back to the film, the football field scene where Owen physically and emotionally pushes Maddy away cuts deep because we discover Owen never sees Maddy again after that moment. There’s an overwhelming focus on trans community and kinship in media and that scene touches on the sad reality that you ultimately need to do it alone.

Jane Schoenbrun: The movie’s structure is non-traditional and another way that it’s non-traditional is that the central relationship in the movie, in many ways, is between Owen and Maddy. But there’s a third person in this relationship, which is this TV show, this spectre of queerness that they both put themselves into and that they formed their relationship around. Obviously, there is kinship and love and perhaps even romance between them. But they’re just two fans of a thing. I think I was trying to stay true to those flickers of pre-coming-out queerness that we experience in younger years, even when we don’t have the words. It feels like an alliance but it’s not necessarily the thing that’s going to be emancipatory; Owen and Maddy are very much on their own separate journeys and they take very different paths. The second half is very much based around Maddy making this decision to return and try to help their friend through this. But ultimately, it’s not going to be sufficient to get Owen to this other world.

I think Owen says they’re waiting for Maddy to ‘force me underground’, to force transition onto them.

Jane Schoenbrun: I do think there’s something really moving to be explored in that kind of pre-transition T4T relationship. It’s similar, I suppose, to Maria and James in Nevada [Imogen Binnie’s masterpiece which Schoenbrun was once set to adapt into film]. I think I was even conscious of this idea of not painting Maddy as this person who’s seen the light and is the saviour. They’re a character who’s struggling in their own way and not necessarily Owen’s knight in shining armour.

I’m glad you mentioned Nevada. The fact we’re not getting an adaptation of it by you is a genuine tragedy.

Jane Schoenbrun: I’ll say this: I’m in no rush to make another devastating egg crack, pre-transition trauma movie. I’d like to make some movies about other kinds of traumas.

You do have Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, your take on the slasher genre. How’s it going?

Jane Schoenbrun: I wrote it last year. My process tends to be two years of starting versions then abandoning them,figuring out what was wrong and going back to it. I’m trying to put it together, it’s very much in the phase where I want to make this movie. I want to make it early next year but that is not entirely in my control. I’m doing the thing where I try to navigate art/commerce stuff that makes it possible for me to keep doing what I do, and I’m crossing my fingers that I get to do it soon.

Sleepaway Camp is one of my favourite slashers so I can’t wait.

Jane Schoenbrun: It’s definitely in conversation with this one. It’s very much a movie about the lineage of the Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Sleepaway Camp style of slasher killer, and it’s also a movie about trans sexuality. That’s another thing where I’m like, if they let me make a movie about trans girl sexuality then I’ve won the poker game again. You know, when have we ever talked about that in culture?

I’m excited for more, but I’m glad that for now we have I Saw the TV Glow and the fact it’ll be around forever.

Jane Schoenbrun: Yeah. I knew that I wasn’t like, ‘OK cool, let me make an action movie.’ Making any movie is hard work but making a movie as a trans person with the level of Hollywood financing that I had to make this movie? I had to make this movie in a way that I was proud of because otherwise I’d rather not make it. I definitely was not ignorant to the fact that I was like, if I can pull it off, that’s a coup that’s going to have meaning and reverberation. That’s what gets me through the marathon of it – I want to make things that matter.

So you’re saying we’re not getting the Jane Schoenbrun Marvel movie?

Jane Schoenbrun: I would reboot Buffy, and I do have an episode idea for The X-Files reboot. I’m always asking my friends, ‘what’s the IP that I should do?’ And I think the idea is that it has to be a B-level IP so that they leave me alone with it. Like, what’s Jane Schoenbrun’s X? Not literally X – X, as in ‘insert franchise here’. The best answers I’ve heard are Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Flubber. There’s something very trans about Flubber.

I haven’t seen Flubber since I was a child – wait, what gender is Flubber? Does Flubber have a gender?

Jane Schoenbrun: Exactly.

I Saw the TV Glow is out in UK and Ireland cinemas now.