I Saw the TV Glow (2024): Psychological Horror and the 1980s

People ask me on the regular how I got interested in horror. Usually, they assume that it has something to do with the fact that I have spent the last 25 years of my life studying medieval literature and culture, and it's not a very long leap from the Middle Ages, which were pretty horrible, to being interested in horror.

The actual truth, however, is that my fascination with horror far predates my even having been aware that the Middle Ages existed. When I was growing up in the 1980s, I used to go with my mom to our local video store. It was the biggest treat ever. She would send me in there with a couple of bucks while she sat out in the car and waited for me. I would pick out one kids movie, and one horror movie. I would put the horror movie underneath the kids movie, so that when I got back to the car, she wouldn't see what I had chosen for my late-night basement screenings. In this low-key sly way, I watched Poltergeist, the Friday the 13th series, the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Beetlejuice, the Child’s Play franchise, and a whole host of other things that were far too frightening for my brain, probably, at that time.

What I remember about those late nights in the basement alone, however, more than any of the specific movies, is that feeling of knowing that there was a whole world out there of scary movies that I wasn't yet supposed to participate in. And I know that I wasn't alone. Half the kids in my 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th grade classes did some version of the same thing. In fact, I think it's safe to say that for a very large number of younger Gen Xers, like myself, their experience of being a child of the 1980s was one of surreptitiously mainlining horror in the basements of their and their friends’ houses, in perpetual fear of being detected by anyone's parents.

There have been some filmic and cinematic efforts to recapture that feeling of being a kid in the 1980s and surreptitiously stealing shivers and creeps. Fear Street parts 1 and 2 have some of that energy. Stranger Things has a lot. But I think the horror work that has come closest to capturing that feeling, that vibe, is the 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow.

This film centers on a kid named Owen, a seventh-grader who is obsessed with a horror show he’s never even been allowed to watch, called The Pink Opaque. The show features two teenage girls name Tara and Isabel who have a psychic connection, which they use to fight the forces of evil, as embodied by a monster boss named Mr. Melancholy. The show looks fucking awful. However, Owen meets an older kid at his school, Maddy, who is also obsessed with the show, and invites him over to watch it one Saturday night. He lies to his parents, saying he’ll be at a sleepover at another kid’s house, and goes to see the show for the first time with Maddy. He’s electrified by it. His obsession deepens.

Despite constant begging, Owen’s parents continue to refuse to let him stay up late and watch the show, even two years later, when he’s a teenager. But no worries, it turns out that, in the interim, Maddy has been making bootleg copies of all the episodes for him. She hands them off to him at school every week, with notes on the front. Owen’s and Maddy’s relationship is mediated by the exchange of archival media. Which, to be honest, describes the vast majority of the high school friendships of nearly everyone I know who went to high school between 1985 and 1995: we traded mix tapes, and later we traded mix CDs. It was a way of showing love, but also of archiving who we were and what we were into at any given moment in time. Some of my best mix tapes were fucking righteous, and I felt that giving them to my friends was like giving my friends an actual piece of me. Nowadays, people make each other playlists, but it’s not quite the same: there’s no physical object to treasure as a concrete trace of the person who made this media for you.

Ugh, I have to say it: I do miss things.

Part of why Maddy loves The Pink Opaque is that she’s being abused by her stepfather, and finds in the show a kind of escape from a withering home life. In an early scene, she warns Owen that he needs to make sure to exit her family’s basement den by dawn, or her stepfather “will break her nose again.” Maddy loves The Pink Opaque because it’s about girls who successfully fight the patriarchal forces of darkness. She would love to be one of those girls; her cruel stepfather wouldn’t stand a chance.

Instead, one day, Maddy burns up her TV, and runs away.

Eight years later, Maddy returns, claiming she’s been living in the world of The Pink Opaque for all the intervening time. She encourages Owen to rewatch the final episode of the series. In that episode, both the main characters are buried alive, and Mr. Melancholy reveals that they will each be “in the midnight realm,” which is a snow globe type trap. As Owen gazes at the snow globe, he thinks that his own “real” life is what’s captured in there. He thinks that he may not trully be Owen, but Isabel, trapped in a psychic vortex created by Mr. Melancholy, while his true body as Isabel is slowly being killed by Mr. Melancholy.

This idea—that the “real” life we are living is somehow a false life, a distraction from a truer self, somewhere else—is of course not unique to this film. Variations on this trope have appeared in the Netflix sci-fi horror series Black Mirror, Jordan Peele’s utterly terrifying film Us, the glorious film Everything Everywhere All at Once, and countless children’s stories, like The Chronicles of Narnia or the Tim Burton film Coraline. Also not original to this series is the idea that your TV can be a portal through to another dimension; my own childhood favorite horror film, Poltergeist, is of course all about that.

What is very interesting and unusual about this particular variation on this trope is that, when invited back to his true realm, Owen says no. It all feels too crazy to him. He can’t accept that he’s really, truly Isabel, a psychic girl from another dimension. So he knocks Maddy down and runs. He spends the rest of his entire life in what Maddy has described as the Midnight Realm—or what I would call the realm of Alienated Labor under Late-Stage American Capitalism. He spends his life doing menial jobs in movie theaters and entertainment centers, until, an old man, he has a wheezing, screaming, panicking fit at a child’s birthday party. He suddenly believes that he has, in fact, chosen the wrong realm. He also believes he’s dying—he, as Isabel, is asphyxiating in a shallow grave in the other realm. Still wheezing violently, he returns to his post at the entertainment center, apologizing for his strange screaming behavior at the party.

The film ends.

As horror films go, this one isn’t particularly scary, in the sense that there really aren’t any scenes that will make you jump, or that will even make your heart race. I rewatched Gremlins recently, and found that a much more startling and “scary” film than I Saw the TV Glow, and—as perhaps many of us remember—Gremlins is a comedy first and a horror film second. So, like, the sheer physiological fear factor in I Saw the TV Glow is low. Real low.

Because the real horror in I Saw the TV Glow isn’t physiological, but existential. The movie isn’t gory or disgusting, it isn’t a film that’s going to make you hide under your blanket in terror at what’s going to happen next. Instead, this film boasts a slow existential burn. In the main character Owen, we witness someone who desperately wants their life to be different than it is, who feels fundamentally alienated from most of the people around him, as well as from his work, and who feels trapped in an identity that he does not fully identify with. Nevertheless, when given the opportunity to try to abandon all that and escape literally into another dimension, Owen turns it down. Owen chooses to remain committed to a reality that he finds restrictive, false, and hollow. We are left in the end to imagine his other self, his truer self, Isabel, slowly asphyxiating and a shallow grave somewhere in another dimension.

Obviously, there is a lot of lingering doubt in the film. It is not clear that Maddy/Tara was telling the truth. It is not crystal clear, that is, that Owen’s lackluster life had an actual escape hatch into another reality. So, for me, what makes the movie interesting and powerful is that it forces us all to ask the question of ourselves: if there were a way to tap out of a life that we find hollow and unreal, would we take it? I'm not sure how many people would. What kind of horribility does a person have to endure to make them actually take a gamble like that? Well, in the logic of this film, there is a clear answer: a person has to be psychologically and physically abused, over the course of a long period of time, and she has to be trapped in a domestic situation that they cannot escape from by any other means. Maddy runs away into the televisual realm because she cannot escape the abuse of her stepfather.

What this film is really about is the psychological state of dissociation. Dissociation is a psychological state into which severely traumatized and often abused people enter. The experience of dissociation is often described as the sense that you are outside of your self, and are trapped in some kind of unreal parallel space. It is a sense of profound alienation, that enables you to watch yourself going through the motions of your regular life as if you are watching a television show. Survivors say that dissociation often involves memory lapses, or a sense that time doesn’t work normally; this is something both Owen and Maddy routinely describe as part of their lived experiences—Maddy in particular. Dissociation is also often associated with a person having more than one identity that they can occupy—again, like Maddy, and, to a lesser extent, like Owen.

Why is Maddy’s experience of dissociation so much stronger than Owen’s? Probably because the abuse she endured was so terrible and so ongoing; we are aware of at least two years during which she is domestically assaulted by her stepfather. The film leaves us to infer that Owen’s core trauma is not physical abuse, but the sudden death of his mother, probably combined with the fact that he has an authoritarian father who mocks him for liking TV shows that are “for girls.”

In the end, this film reads as an allegorical exploration of dissociation, and of how it emerges from abuse, social alienation, and a pervasive sense of not belonging to the world. So, even though the makers of this film have advertised it as “supernatural,” I don’t see a good motivation for that label. Maybe, if we were ever actually sure the “real” realm of Tara and Isabel and their fights against Mr. Melancholy were real, we could say decisively, yes, this is a supernatural horror film. But we’re never clear on that. In fact, we’re never even close to clear on that. The closest we get to that kind of interpretive clarity is Owen’s screaming panic attack at the birthday party.

So, instead, I’d put this film squarely in the genre of psychological horror, where what we’re trained to fear is our own minds, and their capacity to confuse and disorient us about what’s real. Or, if we’re really paying attention, this film is training us to fear domestic abuse situations, which put the human mind in need of dissociation in the first place.

Just to wrap up, I’d note that this film got a PG-13 rating, probably because the profanity is very mild and there is no real violence in the film. But I’m here to tell you that existential and psychological horror are still real horror, and I personally wouldn’t let any 13-year-old that I know watch this film.