For the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, making their highly anticipated follow-up to the breakout indie horror We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a starkly different process. While their debut cost about $100,000 to make and felt like the result of 10 people running wild in the woods somewhere, far off the grid, I Saw the TV Glow was something else entirely: a budget larger than anything they had worked with before, a giant machine where everything had to move in careful synchronization.
“It was so different that it was almost like working in a different medium,” Schoenbrun said. “I really tried to take advantage of that with this film. I tried to make something that could be like almost painted. So many images in this film were so labored over.”