2 suburban teenagers in the 1990s bond over a late-night fantasy TV show. The show is about a girl who fights monsters in a dream world. One of the teenagers starts to suspect that the show is more real than their waking life. Jane Schoenbrun's film is a horror movie about feeling cut off from your own identity and the terror of not knowing who you are.
I Saw the TV Glow is a 2024 horror, drama and fantasy film directed by Jane Schoenbrun. This breakdown covers 4 techniques (1 cinematography, 2 narrative and 1 psychology), each with the scene where you can see it. If you like how it is made, Mulholland Drive uses several of the same techniques.
Adjusting the film's overall color, such as how warm, cold or vivid it looks, to match a character's emotional state. It can also separate different realities or states of mind.
How this film uses it
Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue color the film in pink, lavender and electric blue. These are the colors of late-night television and fluorescent mall lighting. They stand in for the dissociated state the protagonist lives in, which means feeling detached from yourself and your own life. The colors are nostalgic and deeply wrong at the same time.
Where to see it
The strip mall scenes under purple-pink artificial light. The color belongs so exactly to 1990s suburbia that you feel something is wrong before you can think it.
Arranging scenes the way a dream moves, where one image leads to the next by feeling or association. Events don't follow normal cause and effect.
How this film uses it
Schoenbrun builds the film's reality like a dream that is almost real. Things that should be impossible happen and nobody comments. Scenes change with no logic. Nobody ever states the world's rules because in a dream, you simply feel them.
Where to see it
The sequences where the TV show's world bleeds into suburban reality. The film never clearly tells you which layer of reality the characters are in. That uncertainty is where the horror comes from.
Making something familiar look slightly wrong, like an ordinary house or face that feels off. The dread comes from that strangeness, with no obvious threat on screen.
How this film uses it
Schoenbrun films the suburbs so they feel uncanny, which means familiar and slightly wrong at once. It looks like a world but doesn't quite feel like one. The houses, the schools and the malls are all a little off. Because the protagonist feels detached from everything, the ordinary surroundings feel alien.
Where to see it
Owen in the school hallway. The place is perfectly ordinary and the camera shows it slightly wrong. You can see the uncanny in the quality of the light and the rhythm of how people move.
Spending a long time on normal life, character and atmosphere before any real threat arrives. Dread builds bit by bit, so the climax feels inevitable and devastating when it comes.
How this film uses it
Schoenbrun refuses the usual horror moves. The dread promises a scare and the film never gives it to you. The unease keeps going and never settles into something clear like a monster or a haunting. The horror is that the protagonist can't tell whether what they're experiencing is real.
Where to see it
The entire second half of the film. The horror gets deeper with no conventional scare to release it. The dread never resolves, and that is how the film shows what it feels like to not know who you are.
Questions
I Saw the TV Glow: quick answers
What filmmaking techniques does I Saw the TV Glow use?
CineCode breaks down 4 techniques in I Saw the TV Glow (2024): Color Grading as Psychology, Dream Logic Structure, Uncanny and Slow Burn Horror Pacing.
Who directed I Saw the TV Glow?
Jane Schoenbrun directed I Saw the TV Glow, released in 2024.
What films are similar to I Saw the TV Glow?
Films that share techniques with I Saw the TV Glow include Mulholland Drive (2001), Hereditary (2018), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), What Lies Beneath (2000).
