As long as the Internet’s been widely available, there’s been horror games. What started as small roleplay and fan fiction blogs created on dial-up Internet connections slowly grew and developed into dozens of story games, discussion blogs, and writing challenges. The most infamous evolution of these early horror blogs was Creepypasta: collections of short horror stories copied and pasted across the Internet starting on the Something Awful forum and the subreddit r/nosleep. The mass creation and resharing of these tales created a substantial online horror community, and because it’s online it’s open to anyone willing to indulge in the fear of the taboo.
Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair aims to capture this same feeling of these early 2010s horror message boards in a more updated sense. Gone are the email chains of yesteryear, the World’s Fair Challenge is vlog-based with participants creating video diaries updating their lives after participating in the initial “ritual”. The game is simple: a video, a chant to the camera, and a swipe of blood across the screen throw participants into a game supposed to transform the mind and the body. Intimately shot in ways mirroring webcams and phone cameras, this is truly a bittersweet tribute to online horror culture and the dangers that come alongside it.
There are only two named characters in the entire film which gives it a simultaneously intimate and unnerving quality. Casey (Anna Cobb, in her film debut) is the picture of the lonely weird kid stereotyped to frequent the darker corners of the Internet. The majority of the film’s duration is just her sometimes accompanied by her stuffed lemur Poe; her dad makes a voice cameo twice but he is never shown in any capacity. Casey deliberately keeps out of her father’s way, mostly in her (exceedingly cool) bedroom, the adjacent shed, or in the woods. It’s out of this isolation that her choice to initiate herself into the World’s Fair community begins with a Bloody Mary-esque repetition and a smear of blood on the camera. She regularly watches updates from other participants like a woman slowly turning into plastic or May Leitz’s cameo which has her placidly staring at the camera with a pair of bat wings protruding from her back. But, her only actual contact is with a man only referred to as JLB (Michael J. Rogers): one of the bigger creators in the World’s Fair community hiding behind an Unwanted Houseguest profile photo.
Watching Casey delve deeper and deeper into her own World’s Fair experience has a very Marble Hornets-esque feel: seeing her slowly lose grip through the videos they upload is terrifying enough in itself. Cobb really leans into her role as a teen fully immersing herself in an online RPG. Towards the end of her journey, she begins to get violent, possibly reminiscent of the girls that participated in the Slenderman ritual, but that’s not really where the horror stems from. For those of us that spent our formative years frequenting online forums and Internet roleplaying, there’s another familiar sinister aspect to Casey’s online foray. There’s a power dynamic at play obvious to anyone that spent their formative years on unmoderated messageboards: JLB’s interactions with Casey teeter on the edge of outright predatory. He never shows his face to her, but continually pressures her to disclose personal details (though, thankfully, never anything TOO explicit) and encourages her to keep making videos under the guise of checking in. While it seems innocuous enough, especially considering the increasingly disturbing content of Casey’s videos, anyone familiar with the very real danger of grooming can pick up on how these interactions can become infinitely more dangerous than some online curse.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is an interesting addition to the ever-growing subgenre of Internet horror like Unfriended and Host. It’s a fascinating study of the legacy that online horror forums have to this day, especially to weird kids looking for a form of escapism. More importantly, it shows the true hazards of being an impressionable teen on the heavily unregulated Internet — not in a judgemental way, but in a soberingly real manner. Schoenbrun makes her point clear: the evil does not stem from Casey, it comes from the abuse of influence and anonymity of JLB. The legacy of Creepypastas looms large over horror communities, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair acts as a perfectly horrifying homage.
