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“I know how it’s going to end now. I’m going inside the video, through the computer, into the screen.” – Casey, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.

“What if I really was someone else? Very far away on the other side of the television screen” – Maddy, I Saw the TV Glow.

A tulpa is a mystical concept that’s rooted in Tibetan Buddhism where an imaginary entity becomes real and gains sentience if enough people validate its existence and give it power. It’s an idea that runs rampant in horror, albeit typically with individuals and monsters, rather than planes of existence. Tulpas always involve fiction being brought into reality once they gain enough agency. Humanity has a natural curiosity and appetite for delusion, whether it’s something like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, or a more sinister idea like Slenderman. However, who’s to...

When Jane Schoenbrun was in high school, they spent hours devouring Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Schoenbrun watched Sarah Michelle Gellar play Buffy, who over the course of seven seasons, figures out who she really is — a powerful woman chosen to fight evil forces. And Schoenbrun imagined how they might fit into the show. They saw themselves in everyone, from the wacky pal Xander to the broody vampire Angel to Willow and Tara, a pair of witches in love — gender be damned.

“If you’d told me I could press a button and become a cool,...

I Saw the TV Glow.Jane Schoenbrun understands the cursed records of suburban memory. Their films—A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018), We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), and now I Saw the TV Glow (2024)—construct imagined archives from cultural ephemera, like internet lore, YouTube videos, and television shows. These pieces of world-building distort the concept of the transition timeline—a series of images that tracks the effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy—by undercutting the sincerity of the so-called transition “journey” with displays of disappointment and dysphoria. Whether searching for information about ghosts, ghouls, or gender, Schoenbrun’s characters struggle to self-actualize. In I Saw the TV Glow (2024), the cul-de-sacs are covered in chalk hieroglyphs for a séance with the people we might have been. Around every corner lies a new monster of the week: longing, loneliness, horniness.Other artists have used imagined archives as a way to examine desire, projection, and gender.