Curator Watchlist
A haunting, deeply personal horror-drama that turns late-90s nostalgia into a nightmare about identity, dissociation, and the fear of living an unlived life. It’s emotionally raw, formally inventive, and likely to hit hardest for viewers open to metaphor-heavy, mood-first storytelling.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 1h 40m
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Starring: Justice Smith, Jack Haven, Ian Foreman
In late-90s suburbia, a lonely teenager meets a girl at school who introduces him to a mysterious late-night T.V. show — a vision of a supernatural world pulsing beneath their own. As time goes on, however, questions begin to arise about why the show sometimes seems more real than their own lives. In the pale glow of the television, their view of reality begins to crack.
Jane Schoenbrun
Justice Smith, Jack Haven, Ian Foreman
A haunting, deeply personal horror-drama that turns late-90s nostalgia into a nightmare about identity, dissociation, and the fear of living an unlived life. It’s emotionally raw, formally inventive, and likely to hit hardest for viewers open to metaphor-heavy, mood-first storytelling.
I Saw the TV Glow is less interested in jump scares than in the ache of recognition. It uses the language of suburban teen horror, late-night television, and half-remembered obsession to build a story about identity that feels both intimate and cosmic. The result is a film that can seem quiet on the surface while steadily becoming more unsettling and emotionally devastating.
Jane Schoenbrun’s direction is precise about texture: the glow of the screen, the deadness of the suburbs, the way nostalgia can feel like a trap instead of comfort. The film’s surreal imagery and drifting structure won’t work for everyone, but that’s part of its power. It behaves like a memory you can’t quite trust, which makes its emotional logic feel stronger than any literal explanation.
What lingers most is the film’s compassion for the pain of self-erasure. It understands how frightening it can be to know, or suspect, who you are and still not move toward it. That gives the movie a rare kind of horror: not the fear of monsters, but the fear of a life spent standing just outside your own existence.
julie (5★) · 47634 likes
my name is Julie. i am a trans woman. and tonight is the first time i’ve said those words to anyone other than myself. i first started questioning my gender identity around my sophomore year of high school. it had never crossed my mind when i was younger; i thought i was comfortable with my identity, until very gradually becoming overwhelmed with the feeling i wasn’t. looking back in hindsight, i think i had always felt uncomfortable in my own… more
Jamie Lauren Keiles · 32121 likes
horror movie about how if u don’t transition ur lips will eventually become soooo chapped
ghostreel (4★) · 31241 likes
Donnie Darko for they/thems
zoë rose bryant (4.5★) · 22666 likes
“time wasn’t right. it was moving too fast. i was 19, and then i was 20, and then i was 21. like chapters skipped over in a dvd. i told myself ‘this isn’t normal. this isn’t normal. this isn’t how life is supposed to feel.’” was stunned speechless for a few seconds after finishing this. don’t know what else to say other than that it got under my skin in a way few films ever have, with its nightmarish sights… more
Paul (4.5★) · 20116 likes
A heartbreaking rejection of the typical ideas of a coming of age movie. Owen will not enter the wardrobe, he will not follow the white rabbit, he will not go to the Pink Opaque. He will collapse inside himself and decay. Fantastic. My favorite movie of the year now.
A dreamy, mournful suburban coming-of-age story that treats memory, isolation, and longing as something almost supernatural.
A cult teen nightmare about alienation, time, and the uncanny pressure of adolescence, with a similarly haunted mood.
A dreamlike identity puzzle that turns Hollywood fantasy into psychological and emotional dislocation.
For viewers drawn to oppressive atmosphere, surreal imagery, and the feeling of being trapped inside an anxious internal world.
A cold, lonely horror film about isolation, possession, and the terror of emotional abandonment.
A queer, body-conscious fairy tale with a seductive, tragic edge and a strong sense of musical and emotional unreality.
A meditative film about time, grief, and the ache of being stuck in a life you can’t fully inhabit.
A late-90s teen horror title that captures the era’s school-corridor paranoia and media-saturated unease.
Teen alienation, identity formation, and the thrill of finding a secret world beneath high school normalcy.
A suburban psychological drama about bodily unease, selfhood, and the terror of not feeling at home in your own life.
A haunting, dreamlike American Gothic about childhood perception, dread, and the strangeness lurking in open spaces.
For its feverish emotional intensity, bodily horror, and the sense that identity is fracturing under pressure.
identity, trans experience, queer allegory, coming of age, dissociation, nostalgia, media obsession, suburban alienation
surreal horror, psychological drama, queer cinema, 90s nostalgia, dream logic, identity crisis, atmospheric, coming-of-age, existential, art-horror