I watched We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and it’s funny seeing all the critics completely misinterpret the movie and loving or hating it because of it. It’s solidly in a rising genre of horror that’s very unsettling to people who have been very online their whole lives and completely inscrutable to anyone else.
Spoilers after the cut
So my interpretation of the film is it’s about the real life horror of not knowing what happens to someone when they’re away from their computer, or not knowing who someone really is. The horror of the movie is not that anything creepy or scary at all is happening to Casey, it’s the unreality of not knowing if she’s just having fun being a weird little emo kid or if she’s actually seriously mentally ill and needs help. Teens and tweens love to say exaggerated dark things and play with the macabre to vent their angst. It’s like all the goths and emos in 2008 who would post online about self harm that they weren’t actually participating in.
And I thought it was really well executed how when JLB first appears he comes across as this fucking terrifying groomer pedophile who Casey really really shouldn’t be talking to and the idea that he’s watching videos of her sleep is terrifying. The way he keeps encouraging her to make videos is creepy. The horror for most of the movie isn’t Casey doing a dumb dance to a techno song and then screaming it’s that JLB is watching that video on the toilet.
But then at the end when she’s talking about killing her dad or committing suicide, and referencing the actual gun her dad actually has that we’ve seen, the horror is in not knowing if she’s still playing pretend cuz yeah these are pretty intense! And the POV shifts to us being JLB, watching these videos and concerned. If you pause this one scene and read his computer screen, something film festival viewers can’t do, you can see that in 2009 apparently someone had killed themselves on livestream while supposedly playing this game, and JLB saw it happen. So he’s become obsessed with trying to “save” the lonely kids making these videos and checking on them to make sure they’re not actually going to kill themselves. He encourages them to keep making videos because as long as they still have internet activity he knows they aren’t actually dead. He’s trapped in the unreality of not knowing if these strangers are alive or not because of the real horror of not knowing what happens to an online friends when they just suddenly stop posting.
When he expresses actual concern for her safety, she lashes out and gets creeped out. She was pretending the entire time, or at least she says she was, and she stops posting. So JLB doesn’t know if she really was just pretending or if she’ll get help or what. He can only wonder about if this lonely girl he’s formed a parasocial relationship with is okay. that is the horror.
And then the super creepy unsettling scene where he’s recording himself writing fan fiction about himself and Casey meeting IRL and she’s totally okay in the end and nothing bad happened to her. We are ourselves in an unreality of not knowing if this actually happened, if he is just comforting himself, or if he’s deriving a creepy and inappropriate pleasure from this fantasy of praying for and saving these young girls.
I thought it was absolutely fantastically creepy and unsettling and well executed and also I totally understand how most people wouldn’t be able to relate to this in the slightest and would just find it bewildering because they’ve never had the expedience of having like, a LiveJournal friend who posts about depression all the time and then suddenly stops posting.
Well done