A24 has released the trailer for its nostalgic coming-of-age horror film I Saw the TV Glow, and announced the stacked soundtrack, which features new music from Sloppy Jane featuring Phoebe Bridgers, Alex G, Caroline Polachek, Snail Mail, Bartees Strange, Jay Som, and more.
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair), the movie centers around two teenagers — played by Justice Smith and Brigitte Lundy-Paine — who bond over their shared obsession with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-inspired TV show called The Pink Opaque.
In the trailer, soundtracked by yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” Maddy (Lundy-Paine) tells Owen (Smith) that The Pink Opaque “feels more real than real life” before she suddenly vanishes without a trace. Watch the full clip below.
The cast also includes Fred Durst and Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan alongside Ian Foreman, Helena Howard, and Danielle Deadwyler.
“Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own,” reads the official logline. “In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.”
In a recent interview with TheWrap, Schoenbrun explained how their love of TV inspired the film: “It’s about fandom in a way, but I think it’s about much more about — at least for me — a queer experience of kind of looking for glimmers of a magic that I thought couldn’t exist in real life in art and in entertainment. And it’s about how that can be a really loving exchange, but also how that can trap you in the ways that we all, I think, culturally dissociate.”
I Saw the TV Glow arrives in theaters on May 3rd.