We’re All Going to the World’s Fair debuted at Sundance Film Festival 2021 and needless to say, I was a massive fan (as evidenced by my review). Jane Schoenbrun’s debut is a trippy homage to the forums from which legends like Slenderman spawned. But, the World’s Fair holds a lot more to it than just a simple Internet rumor.
I had the chance to speak with Schoenbrun over Zoom shortly following the close of the festival. We discussed online forums, the power dynamics that form within them, and the journey of using horror and film to discover identity.
Film Cred: So I’m super excited, and I’m a huge fan of World’s Fair. I wanted to start by asking, in your post-premiere Q&A you mentioned that the Creepypasta era was a little after your time (as a teen). In your research for the film, was there a particular story or character that shaped your inspiration for the film?
Jane Schoenbrun: Yeah so, it’s embarrassing because it makes it sound inherently negative maybe, but I was first clued in as an out-of-touch twenty-something who didn’t read the same sorts of things on the Internet that I definitely spent a lot of time reading as a teenager. But, the thing that sort of clued me into Creepypasta existing as a phenomenon was the Slenderman stabbings. And there was just something about that story and the idea that you could both believe something and know it wasn’t true that sort of whalloped me. I know that was a very specific and particular instance of schizophrenia and mental illness, but that was sort of the initial lens with which I disappeared down the wormhole of Creepypasta. I just remember the first night that I was googling about it and sort of discovering that this was just this giant thing on the Internet that I totally missed and reading all of these different forums, reading about all these different interpretations and directions that people had taken this very complex user-generated mythos over the years. It was like piecing together a mystery from a bunch of disparate sources, and to me that’s a very Internet specific phenomenon — sort of stumbling across something very dense and needing to do the detective work of piecing it all together. So that was really the thing that I was trying to capture in a lot of ways with the film, like the mythology of the World’s Fair in my movie. You’re only getting the most cursory look at something that’s much deeper and more complex than perhaps even the character of Casey understands. I really wanted to capture that very Internet-y thing of sort of being thrown into the deep end of this thing that was built by so many people.
FC: Yeah, I was around the same age as the girls when the whole Slenderman thing happened. I remember it being on the news, and I got banned at home from looking at more Creepypasta stuff because that kinda threw me into horror.
JS: It’s so relatable when you just think about the kids in my generation after Columbine getting told they couldn’t listen to Rob Zombie or whatever, or I think of kids in the 80s with the Satanic Panic not being allowed to listen to Metallica. Whenever somebody watches my film and thinks of it as a cautionary tale about the Internet, I get pretty sad because I think that it’s two very different things. These cases of mental illness are very different things from what might draw people toward finding what they need emotionally and spiritually from the “real world” and immersing themselves in the culture and art of young people.
FC: So how did your teenage experiences in online roleplaying affect the development of Casey and/or JLB?
JS: The film is loosely inspired by a pretty intimate correspondence that I had with an older man who would comment on stories that I wrote on a message board for horror fanfiction and for fans of the Scream franchise in the early 2000s. And this person initially reached out to me as a “fan” of my writing, but started IM’ing me — and this was back in the days of AOL and dial up Internet. I would log on online to talk to friends and this stranger would IM me and tell me a lot about himself and tell me about his struggles with depression and it quickly became a very intimate relationship that I didn’t really want to be a part of. That was certainly like swimming in my mind while I was writing the script; I didn’t want to adapt my own life, it is not an autobiographical film, but I think that a lot had to do with the unspoken power dynamics at play in this very strange relationship that never moved beyond the Internet into anything more real. I think about the things that we want from each other in these sorts of relationships, the way that we are watching and wanting to be watched in these relationships. I was writing these stories as a young creative person who was trying to express themselves, and this person maybe wanted something very different from me. I think that the film is just really sensitive to the trauma of being seen in this way.
FC: I kind of picked up pretty quickly as soon as JLB kind of got involved. I was thinking “ooof this could devolve really quickly into some weird power play”. So that was an inspiration, the whole mess of power dynamics of the “unregulated Internet”?
JS: Yeah and a lens that I really like thinking about viewing the film through is the lens of “who has the microphone?” and is sort of narrating the story at any given moment. That’s what was so overwhelming about those early days digging into Slenderman is just seeing a story that was a massive fight for control of the microphone. All of these people wanting to take control of where things were going and I think that, in a very subtle way, is the conflict of this film. What Casey is trying to express through her videos is maybe very different from what JLB wants her to express and is sort of vying for power and control of the narrative is really at the heart of it to me.
FC: So about JLB and the ending, you said it was purposefully left vague which made the ending itself — especially his whole monologue at the end — its own little horror story. How do you take people wanting a more concrete ending?
JS: I understand it, I certainly understand the desire for closure, and I totally understand other films that give you some sort of closure and the role that that plays. I think that, for me, trying to craft an authentic, complicated, personal film about what it felt like to grow up in this unreal place and in this unreal body with these unreal relationships it felt like it’d be a disservice to give the film some kind of binary, happy-or-sad ending. It felt much more right to create an ending that would need to sort of be felt more than understood first and then would sort of (hopefully) grow in people’s minds over time. It felt like the honest thing to do.
FC: Last JLB question, me and another one of my colleagues that watched the film were talking about his icon. Was it kind of inspired by Jeff the Killer? Because we were thinking that it looks oddly familiar.
JS: It’s from a really popular Creepypasta called “Unwanted Houseguest” from around the same time as Jeff the Killer and Slenderman, it was one of the more popular Creepypastas from those really really popular YouTube rap battles with Unwanted Houseguest. I can’t reveal the identity of Unwanted Houseguest, but it was a real coincidence. It was somebody I knew personally and when we were making the film, the original idea was just to have that be a blank Skype screen with no video on. I realized that scene would just be 100x more effective if instead of staring at nothing you were staring at this very strange and ambivalent image.
FC: I thought that was a really cool touch. I’m not sure if I was personally reading too much into Casey’s experiences because we’re around the same age, but her descriptions of feeling disconnected from herself felt a lot like my own experience with dysphoria and being nonbinary. Was that intentional, or am I just reading way too much into it?
JS: Yes and no, I don’t necessarily think of the character as trans or not trans — either of them JLB or Casey. I think if you wanted to go deep into an analysis of the film and ask that question, that’s interesting to me but not something that I was interested in getting too deep into because I wanted to leave a lot open to people that have experiences with the film. But what I can say is that this film is 100% inspired by dysphoria. When I started working on it I was still super repressed about my own dysphoria and that idea of making the film was sort of a desire to explore those feelings and try to figure them out. By the time the script was done I figured out what they were and by the time I was making the movie I was starting my transition. So the film is very much an attempt to not explain dysphoria but to represent it. For me it’s by far the most emotionally impactful thing that could possibly happen with the movie is that other people that grew up with dysphoria but didn’t necessarily have a name for it will see the film and recognize themselves in it. I think that if I’d seen this sort of film or if I knew that these feelings were dysphoric feelings — if I had that kind of language when I was seventeen years old I would’ve had a really different life. I’m really hoping the film can reach people and start conversations about transness and dysphoria, but it actually looks like not just what cis people think it looks like.
FC: Also, personally, I got incredibly hyped for NyxFear’s cameo; she’s been a favorite creator of mine for a while. I’ve been keeping up with her disturbing films for quarantine series. How did you curate or pick who would make the best “true to form” Creepypasta videos to include?
JS: I can’t take any credit for finding her, I wasn’t familiar with her videos when we started the casting process. My casting director Abby saw her videos and sent them to me and I just spent an entire weekend binging everything she’d made. Some of her videos she’d made really spoke to me very deeply, and I think are almost a footnote to the movie in a lot of ways. A lot of what she talks about in terms of horror being a real bomb for people who are coming of age and were trans, it really resonated with what I was trying to explore in the film. So when I saw her videos I just knew that she needed to be part of the film. We reached out and she was down; I was actually going down to Texas where she lives for a film screening of another project and rented a car and drove five hours out of the way to film that scene with her in her home and it was an incredible experience. She actually has another scene in the movie that did not end up in the final cut that I was really bummed didn’t make it, it was a scene towards the end of the movie and she’s incredible and it was a really fun scene. We cut a lot out of the ending of the movie and it was definitely the right decision, but it was really heartbreaking because she’s an incredible actress and such a breath of life. I hope that it’s not the last time you see her outside of her own art and in other people’s films, she’s a great actress.
FC: Were there any other huge inspirations for World’s Fair, like movies or TV shows or anything other piece of media?
JS: I think I draw more inspiration from music, in a weird way. You know how there’s people that smell colors? I think I can film songs? Writing to music is a huge part in my creative process and I think that what excites me about making a movie in a pretty neat way is making something that can feel like some of my favorite music and some of my favorite songs. I love shoegaze music, I love ambient music. I listened to a ton of The Blue Nile band from the 80s when I was writing the script and trying to evoke a certain mood that I can sort of wash into when I listen to my favorite records but doing it through the medium of film. That was a major goal of mine. But also the music of Alex G who scored the movie was also a huge influence as well.
FC: Yeah, a lot of people in the waiting room were like “Oh my God Alex G is doing the soundtrack!” I’d never heard of him, but I loved the soundtrack and thought it worked super well with the movie. I started adding his songs to my playlists, so thank you for introducing me to his work! So the horror community, for me and a lot of my friends, has been a super impactful influence on our relationships with gender. What’s it like for you being an openly trans person in the horror community, and how has horror impacted you?
JS: It’s a hard thing to express. Like, from my youngest age — and honestly probably from a preconscious age — I found great comfort in things that other people found morbid or very scary. And just for whatever reason, the night and that imagery that others might find very grotesque to me felt like a safe place to hide. I think that I’m not the only trans person that’s sort of had that experience of looking for themselves in places that other people might feel like are dark or places where you shouldn’t go. It’s one of my main goals as an artist is to just pay tribute to the beauty of things that other people might find grotesque. That’s definitely, as a trans artist and as a horror fan, what I’m trying to do with the film.
FC: That’s really cool, sorry that just made me super excited. I’ll end on a cheesy question: what’s your favorite horror movie, or list of horror movies?
JS: I think the first horror movie that I fell in love with was A Nightmare on Elm Street. I had a friend when we were in fifth grade we watched every single one of those movies from the video store. That was when I first saw the dream of the horror film. I was really into the Scream movies as a teenager, that was the movie that partially inspired this — my experiences on a Scream message board. I think, as an adult, my favorite horror movie would be Possession. Have you ever seen that movie?
FC: Wait, that’s the one with the girl screaming screaming in the subway for a while right?
JS: Yeah with milk coming out of her mouth!
FC: Yeah!
JS: I remember I saw that film with my partner on Valentine’s Day at a movie theater. That feeling of being in awe of where a movie is taking you because you didn’t think it was allowed is like my favorite thing.
FC: Well, thank you so much for this opportunity! I’ve been really excited to talk about this.
JS: Yeah, I’m glad you responded to the film! Like when people come from a background of dysphoria, that’s the reason I made it. It’s such an incredible thing to try to articulate something and have other people respond to it, it’s really meaningful.
FC: It just made me super excited to see another openly trans person premiering something at Sundance that happened to also be a film that I resonated with and a lot of my friends resonated with because we were the weird kids spending our free time on r/nosleep. Again, thank you so much!
