Certified Fresh A24 Horror Movie Now Streaming This Weekend

Fall of 2024 is here and there’s one A24 movie you need to see now streaming on Max. That’s right, film festival sensation I Saw the TV Glow made its way home so you can watch with your subscriptions. Director Jane Schoenbrun’s second mind-bending feature is ready for a rewatch, or first watch, on Max. I Saw the TV Glow stars Justice Smith as Owen and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy. These two teenagers are stuck in 1990s-flavored suburbia and looking for anything to take them out of their boring daily routines. Owen and Maddy discover The Pink Opaque, an era-appropriate TV show for teenagers that basically rewires their brain chemistry. As life continues, there’s more to their daily existence than either of these teens could have bargained for.

When it comes to mood, lighting, and general vibes at the movies this year, I Saw the TV Glow is the reigning champion. Numerous critics loved the aesthetic touches that Schoenbrun layered throughout this movie. If you grew up in the 1990s, or are currently immersed in Y2K fever, there’s a lot to love about the horror movie. Smith and Lundy-Paine both deliver engrossing performances as Owen and Maddy. If you’re not a fan of body horror, there are still harrowing sequences in I Saw the TV Glow that will bounce off the walls of your brain for weeks on end. This is a stirring movie on multiple accounts and fans of the horror genre probably owe it to themselves to at least check it out before Halloween completely takes hold.

 I Saw the TV Glow‘s amazing atmospheric soundtrack also deserves a shout out here. Indie gold star acts like Phoebe Bridgers, yeule, Caroline Polacheck and King Woman are all represented here. Schoenbrun characterized these inclusions as reaching for the kind of performances that used to populate TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a previous interview with Bloody Disgusting, the filmmaker talked about wanting to craft a “90s mixtape that didn’t exist yet.” By most accounts, this was a success for the film. While not really using exact samples, the musical cues get everyone into the right frame of mind, just in time for the gut wrenching revelations across the runtime of this movie. To say any more would spoil some of the surprises hiding beneath the surface.

I Saw The TV Glow & Nostalgia

While I Saw the TV Glow garnered some awards buzz earlier this year, there’s also the reality of being a smaller A24 movie in a sea of massive tentpoles and other big-budget releases in 2024. ComicBook sat down with Schoenbrun to talk about the idea of nostalgia. Parts of this narrative feel vaguely personal, but also appealing towards a shared upbringing that basically doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a movie in transition in a lot of ways. 

“I think that the writing process is when I’m really digging. Because my creative process that I’ve found that works for me is one where the thing that I’m writing is exploring, not so much trying to explain, but almost investigating whatever it is that I’m investigating, or working through, or dealing with in my real life,” Schoenbrun explained during our conversation. “So, for instance, this film was written in the immediate aftermath of beginning transition, as my entire world and everything that I thought of as my home was being called into question while I was also running towards a future that felt exciting to me in a way that I had never done before. The movie is really trying to just, not so much tell you how that feels, but to create an authentic expression from within that experience.”

“I think it’s usually that part of the process that feels most purely, I don’t know that I would say therapeutic, but where I am most deeply engaging with the personal in a way that feels transformative,” they continued. “When you make a movie, that’s just fun. That’s just getting to play, hopefully, in a sandbox with a lot of other cool weirdos. Then when you finish a movie, when you edit it, that’s like you return to the first part of the process, but it’s much more about imagining how to fine-tune this thing so that the people watching it can have the deepest possible experience with it.”

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