Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A Long December, which has never felt longer: digital kills combined with film texture and VHS love (return of the Videodrome flesh slot from TV Glow). I liked it, of course – the fantasy of going inside your favorite horror franchise to make out with Gillian Anderson.
Tag: jane schoenbrun
I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun)
Much larger in scope than Jane’s previous movie – even though it’s still just two lead characters who spend their nights looking at screens. Two awkward students bond over a TV show named after a Cocteau Twins album, a Buffy/X-Files-ish thing with deep lore. They try watching it together but they’re both afraid of their stepdads and settle for trading VHS tapes. They attend Void High School “VHS,” home of the Vultures, and lead dude Owen (Justice Smith of that recent Dungeons & Dragons movie) starts talking to us, so the movie’s never going for naturalism.
The stars of the show-in-the-show are Helena “Madeline” Howard and Snail Mail. Also, a suspicious mention of Michael Stipe right before a TV episode about where the ice cream man goes in wintertime.
The older girl with a later bedtime is Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine, a daughter in Bill & Ted 3), and she twice offers to take him away from it all. She runs away from home but he freaks out and doesn’t join her, then his mom dies and the TV show is canceled. Eight years later Maddie reappears and says she’s been living inside the show after having herself buried alive in Phoenix (haha), and says they need to (re)bury themselves now to save their TV avatars, but he pushes her down and runs. Twenty years later, he’s alone, has made no career progress, and has a Videodrome TV inside his body.
Good, mysterious movie, evoking thoughts on nostalgia and (super)fandom and friendship and risks not taken, even though the creator has said that it’s just about being trans.
Ice Cream Man in early season of The Pink Opaque, played by Albert Birney:
Nightbreed guy in the unreleased post-final season:
Not the biggest World’s Fair fan, I held off on watching this until I saw that pd187 approved of it.
Good Sam Adams article here despite the “ending explained” hook.