Jane Schoenbrun is this close to being attacked by a stray kickball. We’re sitting outside a brewery in Austin during South by Southwest as a pack of grade-schoolers turn our secluded spot into their playground. Schoenbrun, whose new movie, I Saw the TV Glow, was this year’s buzziest Sundance sensation, has been thrust into the limelight that accompanies a hip A24 release—already an overwhelming position to be in without the perils of unwanted athletics. I ask if we should find another table. “No, it adds an interesting danger,” Schoenbrun says.

The 37-year-old director can handle minor hazards. Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, makes enigmatic art films that double as analogies about the transgender experience. Their debut narrative feature, 2022’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was a restrained psychodrama about a lonely teenager who takes part in an online role-playing game said to distort participants’ bodies. It was strange and sullen, the sort of slow-burning indie that’s good for street cred but not commercial fanfare. I Saw the TV Glow (in select theaters May 3) had a bigger budget and has gotten more publicity, but it also colors outside the lines of Hollywood conventions. Watching it is a bit like being hit by a kickball: Afterward, you need a moment to recover.

While I Saw the TV Glow isn’t a work of memoir, Schoenbrun’s entire life has been leading to this project—and a mushroom trip helped. Schoenbrun realized they had written We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a movie about someone willing to mutate herself if it might make her feel whole, as a way of acknowledging their own transness. Schoenbrun had long felt a dysphoria they couldn’t classify, an otherness that sent them searching for corollaries in Judith Butler texts. Turns out the answer was right there in the script. Upon wrapping World’s Fair in early 2020, Schoenbrun “disappeared for two years, and came out a girl.” Then they made I Saw the TV Glow.

An eerie coming-of-age fable about the connection adolescents form with the media they consume, I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), ’90s suburban outcasts who bond over their shared affection for a SNICK-esque show called The Pink Opaque. The uncanny cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Are You Afraid of the Dark? lets Owen and Maddy disassociate from their alienated lives. They feel more seen by its teen heroines (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan, the latter better known as the musician Snail Mail) than by their peers or parents. With time, reality and make-believe blur. Maddy more or less enters The Pink Opaque and tries desperately to bring Owen with her.

I Saw the TV Glow is Schoenbrun’s ode to Buffy, Goosebumps, The X-Files, and other relics that ignited something inside them the way the horror genre, with its emphasis on oddballs and otherworldliness, does for so many queer striplings. It also resists what Schoenbrun sees as “misleading” ideas about transness that have seeped into pop culture, which tends to rely on binaries—boys transitioning to girls, girls transitioning to boys. “A lot of those narratives are either crafted by cis people from a completely voyeuristic perspective, or they were crafted by trans people trying to make themselves legible in a way that cis people can make into a Hallmark card,” they say. “I very proudly identify as nonbinary. I don’t think my relationship to gender is something that I completely understand. It’s actually quite comforting to embrace incoherence.”

Schoenbrun currently has three long-term romantic partners, including one they’ve dated since high school. (She was the first person to suggest to Schoenbrun that they might be trans. The filmmaker gives her “infinite thanks” in the closing credits of World’s Fair.) Splitting time between Brooklyn and upstate New York, they’ve built an existence largely estranged from where they grew up in Westchester, the tony county about 40 minutes from Central Park. As a teenager, Schoenbrun took the train into the city to see Rilo Kiley and Sufjan Stevens concerts. On family vacations, they’d spend time alone listening to Belle and Sebastian. “All of that music was like an outlet to not be emotionally earnest in my real life,” they recall. “I was a quote, unquote boy, and that’s not how boys interact. I do think that the city was a space where I could continue to differentiate myself from the homogenized, creepy, conservative, and just normative suburban place that I had been told was my home.”

Talking to Schoenbrun for a few hours is like witnessing a seminar in self-actualization. Their quippy intellectualism never wanes; nor does their encyclopedic knowledge of entertainment, or their sense of humor. Schoenbrun’s mouth curves naturally into a smile as they talk. Afterward, while we stroll past themed pinball machines at a nearby arcade, they get excited about everything from The Simpsons to Johnny Mnemonic. Spotting a Sopranos version, Schoenbrun quickly pegs which season it represents based on the characters featured. “This one is calling to me,” they joke, pointing to a machine with a sultry Jessica Simpson looming overhead.

I Saw the TV Glow started with the image of a teenager in an open grave. Schoenbrun wanted to make a movie about a young adult program that ended in a “really fucked-up and disturbing way.” Scratchy VHS recordings would be a physical manifestation of the wounds The Pink Opaque’s viewers still carried with them. “Very early on, there was this idea that the show ends with the main characters buried alive, and slowly the space between the characters and the people watching the show would collapse,” they say. Schoenbrun briefly considered designing the entire film as a two-hour SNICK block, including commercials; by the final frames, the audience would realize the footage was being filtered through haunted childhood memories.

As the story evolved, Schoenbrun introduced idiosyncrasies native to the pre-social-media era. “My youth was the video-store-to-friend’s-basement pipeline,” they say. So Maddy and Owen spend time in Maddy’s basement, watching The Pink Opaque late at night and having stilted conversations about their homelives. “Jane does this brilliant thing where the way these teenagers talk is very familiar because it feels like it’s from teen soap shows, but it’s slowed down and stretched out in a way that you’re hypnotized,” Lundy-Paine says. “You’re surrendering to the poetry of this type of dialogue that we’ve taken in our whole lives, subconsciously. It reminds me of how Yorgos Lanthimos’s actors talk about making movies with him. I saw World’s Fair, so I knew the tempo we were living in. I approached it from understanding that it would need to feel strange and unsettling.”

Schoenbrun positions I Saw the TV Glow’s provincial misfits within a lineage established by Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and Stranger Things. They even got Emma Stone, who produced the movie, to email the owner of a Westchester house where the director used to hang out, hoping to get permission to revisit the basement. Stone was a helpful collaborator throughout the process, the filmmaker says, participating in pitch calls with financiers and bonding with Schoenbrum over the British horror parody Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. She is one of several A-listers in Schoenbrun’s corner, a roster that includes Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polachek (both of whom contributed to TV Glow’s soundtrack) and Green Knight director David Lowery, who has known Schoenbrun since the latter worked at the nonprofit Independent Filmmaker Project in the 2010s. Lowery was part of an experimental variety anthology that Schoenbrun cocreated. He later became an executive producer on World’s Fair, contacting distribution executives to encourage them to see the movie at Sundance.

“It felt like I was watching an entirely new form emerge from the ether of our culture and Jane’s own experiences,” Lowery says. “It’s a movie that’s partially rooted in a webcam’s point of view, but it doesn’t feel like a screenshare thriller or a movie that’s technologically oriented. It feels intensely physiological. I saw the point where the waves broke against the shore of my own taste and leapt into a territory that I was completely unaware of, which was the ‘extremely online’ perspective that the film participates in. I never fully understood the language of the online filmmaker, and it felt like Jane was bringing that into the language of cinema that I came from. I was witnessing a generational fault line: Here’s the voice of a filmmaker who could speak to the current and future generations in a way that I never could.”

As someone who canvassed message boards and other early-internet hubs, Schoenbrun treats screens as the foundation of contemporary life. What started as a planned “screen trilogy” has morphed into what they joke is a “screen septology.” One installment is a novel, called Public Access Afterworld, that explores transition itself. Schoenbrun compares its scope to that of Harry Potter or Dune. “I world-built this century-spanning fantasy, sci-fi epic,” they say. “I could tell you the story of it, but it would take me an hour.” If all goes well, it could be franchise material. They also have another movie script ready to go—Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a gory slasher comedy.

“I’ve hung out with Jane so much since all of this, and there’s never been a dull moment,” says Jordan, who makes her acting debut in TV Glow. “They’re such a trip…. When I lived in Brooklyn, I had this crazy loft apartment in Greenpoint, and one time me and Jane hunkered up there, just getting stoned and watching music videos for hours and hours and hours. We maybe listened to the Shallow Hal soundtrack…a forgotten indie masterpiece.”

With I Saw the TV Glow entering the world in earnest, Schoenbrun is thinking a lot about what it means to become a public figure, and to seek protection from the crucible of fame. Instead of indulging in first-class airline tickets, Schoenbrun asked A24 to subsidize SXSW travel for a few close friends. Instead of feeling daunted by journalists attempting to capture Schoenbrun’s interiority in profiles while children punt balls nearby, they view self-promotion as separate from anything concerning their actual day-to-day circumstances.

“There are many people who get into this space because they actually thrive on power or social climbing, or on the glitz and glamour of celebrity,” Schoenbrun says. “I think I enjoy those things from a wouldn’t-that-be-interesting? perspective, but I actively need to heal from them. I need to recede and shower, and the shower is just smoking weed and watching movies with my friends. Promoting a movie as a trans person right now involves a participation within this capitalist machinery that I am too sensitive not to be sickened by. I need to go and remember who I am.”

Queer millennials and Gen X’ers often say they wish certain shows, films, or books existed when they were growing up, and usually those shows, films, or books portray a version of coming out where everything turns out okay. Schoenbrun is interested, for now at least, in work that’s more slippery. I Saw the TV Glow can be interpreted many ways, some of which are quite upsetting. And yet the ingenuity Schoenbrun pours into it, from the supernatural shock of The Pink Opaque to the philosophical fantasia that ends the film, is its own feat, proof that queer tales don’t need feel-good sentimentality to be inspiring. Soon, some kid will say this movie changed their life.

After I play Dance Dance Revolution with one of Schoenbrun’s travel companions—we step to a remix of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind” as Schoenbrun and I rave about the song’s use in last year’s All of Us Strangers—I leave them to play games with their friends, unencumbered by a reporter’s watchful eye. Schoenbrun says they’ll probably head out after I do, but as I exit a few minutes later, I spot the group through the window, clustered around the grand DDR machine. It is glowing, and they look happy.