I Saw the TVs Glowing.

My generation was stiffed for fantasy horror. Lon Chaney and Conrad Veidt didn't mean much to my olds but they did have Hollywood European masters like James Whale and Karl Freund batting out long-life monster classic movies, with Val Lewton as a chaser. We on the other hand were protected by career civil servants proudly boasting on media that they had purged our screens of the corrupting horror films destroying overseas youth - like The Catman of Paris! The salaried custodians hung on into the era of those tacky British Hammer films, which topped up the Gainsborough costume melo formula with dabs of Technicolor gore. 

Eddie Cahn & J. Lee Wilder snuck into the outlets that encouraged us to believe this stuff was transgressive. It was only thanks to furtive industry pressures and a bit of not wanting to look too ridiculous that the Seigle Invasion of the Body Snatchers got two bookings in greater Sydney. The generation who came along after us did better. They were the Fantasy Film Festivals lot, getting Paul Naschy and Dario Argento on their way to the drive-ins. 

Action moved from cobweb castles through a line of visions of contemporary U.S. weird - cloaked Bela Lugosi looming in the mist next to the family refrigerator, The Fly escaping its B movie world into Cronenberg land. A dancing dwarf dominated  Twin Peaks or Bodysnatchers went big  close up on Dana Wynter's eyes.

Well, we have since gone through a period of respectability for monster movies and lackluster it was. Think Coppola's Dracula, Ken Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Tom Cruise as The Mummy. However, there's a new player. U.S. indie producer A24 has been batting out a string of budget shockers which have been filling the void that is engulfing theatrical distribution.  In the wake of their airing Ari Aster films Midsommar onwards, we could see Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow coming - festival bookings follow Sundance and sympathetic notices from writers who normally consider these beneath them.

This one echoes the phosphorescent make-ups and spooky nighttime settings of  Schoenbrun's admired 2021 debut We're All Going to the World's Fair. Black teenager Ian Foreman is found wandering Void High's already surreal school celebration - a billowing rainbow parachute silk dome, a light-up Fruitopia machine in the gloom. Who should Foreman find there but equally alienated Brigitte Lundy Paine, who relates, though she's two years his senior. The thing that makes her conspicuous is that she's engrossed in an episode guide for "The Pink Opaque" TV program which he's never been able to watch because it comes on after his bedtime, in the young adult zone that precedes late-night black and white movies for old people. The Pink Opaque becomes central to the film, more intense than the drabness that is the kids' small town reality. 

Commentators home in on the pair's rule-setting dialogue. Complete with a hint of mustache, she prompts "I like girls. What do you like?" That out of the way they hit on having him do a secret sleep-over at her home to watch the forbidden program, which is a low fidelity old-format piece. She takes to leaving pirate VHS copies in the school Dark Room (where else?) for him.  He has to scrub off the reproduction of the show's spook symbol that she's drawn in pink marker on his back. Observers seem to recognise their own viewing - Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the most common nomination. Stranger Things gets a nod. Curiously no one mentions Meliés and the Tarot Deck whose Man in the Moon and Mr. Punch duo are strikingly rendered in the on-screen series. 

... and we're only starting.  With diversions like a downed wire setting fire to the Pink Opaque guide or glowing coloured chalk graffiti on the roads, Lundy Paine vanishes and the kid, grown to be Justice Smith, becomes gopher in the local mall Fun Center, where the manager is lewdly abusive. Ten years later, she makes an abrupt reappearance - in the after-hours frozen goods division of course. She claims to have left this joyless life and really entered The Pink Opaque, through being buried alive, and has prepared a plot near the sports oval, for him.

 Such is the film's hallucinatory strength that we are drawn to her morbid vision rather than his oppressive reality. This goes with Smith's shaking off the alternative worldview as a useful member of society. The Pink Opaque comes back on streaming - the episode he saw in her lounge room. "The whole thing had become cheezy and cheap." We've got to the film's most disturbing concept. Nostalgia and fandom are on the operating table.

Ian Foreman,  Brigitte Lundy Paine

Using real locations, the set-up is done with basic characterisation, muttered straight-faced dialogue and voice-over and staged with a minimal supply of support players. Isolation is the film's key element.  It also cuts costs. Fear doesn't rise from the tomb anymore.  Now it comes out of the TV - Poltergeist, Harlequin, Videodrome, The Ring. 

What I Saw the TV Glow is saying is up for debate. The film's solemnity makes it ridicule proof. I can only wonder how the passage of years will leave it. It seems crass to believe that Jane Schoenbrun is just jerking our chain. All we are lacking for the full experience is the protection of professional moralists to tell us how dangerous it is. I now understand they were part of the show. 

Barrie Pattison 2024