I Saw The TV Glow Is The Most Original Horror Movie In Years, See The Proof

By Jason Collins | Published 7 months ago

This yeaer is shaping up to be a big one for movies, with some of the highly-anticipated releases, like Dune: Part Two, Longlegs, Furiosa, Horizon, and Twisters, finally arriving on the silver screens. Yet, among all of those big titles, I Saw the TV Glow might be the most exciting movie and the most original release we’ll see this year. You can see the trailer below:

The trailer for I Saw the TV Glow dropped less than a week ago, and it introduces us to two friends, Owen and Maddy, and their shared love for The Pink Opaque, an in-universe supernatural teen drama complete with monsters of the week and angsty teen music. However, after the show is canceled, the lines between reality and the show start to blur, and the supernatural seeps into Owen and Maddy’s world. While Maddy accepts the thinning of the veil, Owen fights inner battles of his own.

Instead of jump scares, over-exploited dogmatic themes, and other cheap thrills, I Saw the TV Glow is drenched in quietly creepy neon lights and filled with bizarre imagery…

I Saw the TV Glow doesn’t quite look like any other movie coming out in 2024. But more importantly, it doesn’t look like any other horror release. The horror genre has been suffering a drought recently, and we’re not talking about content but fresh ideas.

Jane Schoenbrun, who impressed critics with 2022’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, wrote and directed I Saw the TV Glow.

We probably already have a dozen possessed killer nuns, exorcisms are gracing the cinemas all around, dead people left and right, and all of that is backed up by pretty weak storytelling techniques like jump scares—what happened to good old-fashioned, existential dread-inducing horrors?

Instead of jump scares, over-exploited dogmatic themes, and other cheap thrills, I Saw the TV Glow is drenched in quietly creepy neon lights and filled with bizarre imagery that delicately sit right where they’re supposed to—on the fine line between recognizable reality, and the horrific world of its in-universe TV show.

I Saw the TV Glow releases in theaters on May 3.

I Saw the TV Glow premiered in the Midnight section at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival on January 18 but it also had a subsequent screening at the 74^th Berlin International Film Festival on February 20. The feature was initially announced in 2021, with Jane Schoenbrun as the writer and director. Emma Stone is set to produce the movie under her Fruit Tree Banner, with A24 producing, financing, and distributing the movie. The film’s cast was revealed in August 2022, after the principal photography had concluded.

I Saw the TV Glow currently has 91 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising the film’s ability to retain the seductive fear of Jane Schoenbrun’s previous release—We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—and its themes, while examining them at a much larger scale. I Saw the TV Glow releases in theaters on May 3.