i have! it's one of the most effective horror films i've seen in years. when the credits rolled i didn't think it was all that special, but i couldn't stop thinking about it. you know how some movies feel fun and cohesive in the moment, but then after it's over you start picking it apart and realize the whole damn thing makes no sense? We're All Going To The World's Fair is the opposite of that.
it's so silent, so uneventful. you keep wanting to see the ghost or the twist or the spooky Thing, and when the film is over and there hasn't been any of that you're like "wait that was it?" but that's exactly what makes it so effective. this film explores an experience that is very personal to me and that i haven't seen represented in cinema quite so specifically since Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade. it's about people who are desperate for the world to be deeper than it is, who would rather pretend to live in a horror story than the flat banality of 21st century life. it's about people growing up on the internet trying to find meaning in the wires, trying to find some story bigger than themselves that they can be part of.
when i was in high school (2004-08) i was obsessed with werewolves. i wanted to be one, i wrote hundreds of pages of fiction set in this truly bonkers 12-book cycle i'd imagined. i had a friend who said she was a werewolf, and for a couple years i was fully inside this idea that there were supernatural creatures alongside us. it was the era of urban fantasy, you know? i hated high school so much, and i felt disgusting in my pubescent body. i felt like everyone saw me as a predator-in-waiting, or a school-shooter-in-waiting, and it made me suicidal. it felt like a death sentence, that i would be ground up by the machine of the world into one of two things-- a monster who hurts people, or a suit who dies alone & unknown. what i wanted more than anything was to tear off my skin and rip out my heart so that people could see, so i could prove to them, i'm more than this, please let me live, i have to be more than this.
i begged the universe to let me become so physically monstrous that i'd have no choice but to opt out of this miserably dull and cruel life in favor of some dangerous otherworld in the margins, where i could finally be among people who saw me. who embraced me for who i was. god, when i lay it all out like that i was SO obviously transgender. how did it take me until fucking 2017 before i figured it out? yeesh
anyway, despite having many conversations with the moon and doing the odd half-assed blood ritual with my werewolf friend, i never got a TF sequence of my own. i wanted it to be real so so so so much, but the proof just wasn't there. it ironically mirrors the typical christian disenfranchisement narrative-- please lord, give me a sign and i will be yours forever! alas, alas, alas. even as a teen, i'd lived too long in the bible belt to just ignore the dangers of blind faith. it hurt too much, and buddy let me tell you i was in toxic divorce mode over it until at least age 22. but in my senior year of high school i caught a rerun of the original Cosmos and got really into Carl Sagan, whose cosmotic (as opposed to chaotic) philosophy changed my life in a big way. his notion that "we are a way for the universe to know itself" gave me a much healthier framework for expressing my desire for a connection to something bigger than myself.
thing is, i still feel captivated by the spiritual experiences i had back then, still feel that tug towards the moon. if someone invented werewolves tomorrow you KNOW i'd be first in line for that shit.
We're All Going To The World's Fair distills so much of that experience without even really talking about it in words. for all that i dreamed of running through woods and fields, tasting blood on my tongue, most of my time was spent in front of a computer, in the dark, talking to strangers on forums and in chat rooms. i would confide my Dark Secrets with all the gravity of a mysteriously edgy mid-tier shonen anime side character, and it felt real. the pull of that digital realness can be intoxicating, it can eat your life up from the inside-- because what if it is real? what if the world is more than just this? wouldn't it be worth the cost, wouldn't anything be worth an encounter with the undeniably supernatural, even (perhaps especially) if it kills you?
obviously there's a lot of overlap here with cult mindset, religious fanaticism, conspiracy theory communities. it's all down to the same thing, i think-- when the world has nothing to offer but alienation, you'll do anything to be part of something bigger than yourself. i think we want to be part of a story that cares about us, or at least involves us enough that our contributions matter. that belief is core to my understanding of communism, but that's a rant for another day. point is WAGTTWF puts us inside the inception point of that obsession, and shows us how reality can bend around a person if they believe enough, and if you see them from the right angle. that's what makes this film so scary. when the main girl is ripping her beloved stuffed animal apart on camera, we want to believe she's possessed because she wants us to believe she's possessed. maybe she even is possessed-- by the story of the World's Fair. the violence is a demonstration of her willingness to become a vessel for that story, and simultaneously a plea to the universe to just let this be real. it's the creation of a document that looks and feels real, that you can point to as proof that it's real, that you can watch and rewatch later and ask yourself, why isn't real life as real as that was?
but the next day comes, as it always does, and the world remains solid, as it always has been. what feels real and true in the dark of night (i had a few incidents as a teen, and they still feel scarily real to me today) yields and folds to empirical reality in the bright of day. she sees her stuffed animal destroyed and cries, maybe because she doesn't remember doing it, maybe because she regrets doing it, maybe because she hoped to wake up somewhere or something else. it's the doubt that kills you. the film never explicitly tells you what's real or not, and that's what makes it such a visceral experience. we go to the cinema to suspend our disbelief and imagine a fantastical world. it's the same drive that the protagonist feels. we want to believe that she is experiencing the supernatural, we want the tension to explode into something we can point to as the Monster, the Villain, the Dark Force. but it refuses to give us that, because reality doesn't give us that. what we want is unhealthy for her; what she wants is unhealthy for her; maybe it's unhealthy for us, too. i think a lot of people don't like WAGTTWF precisely because it refuses to drop the mirror and tell you how to feel. it points out, i think quite rightly, that the real bone-chilling horror of 21st century living is that there is no magic, there are no monsters. there's just a screen, glowing in the dark, that can show you anything you want to see, that can take you to people who believe anything you want to believe. it purports to save you from alienation by alienating you even further from reality, and it works because god damn it it's fun and exciting and it can even be the thing that saves a person's life. but it can just as easily be the thing that destroys them. there is no god on the other side of the screen, no grand narrative, no true calling. it's only us, all of us, and the meaning we make of it. that's pretty fucking scary!!
the only other thing i want to say about that movie is, there's this older guy who messages with the main character a bit right? when i watched it with friends most everyone else saw him as a creep and a predator, automatically hate-able. which isn't a bad read necessarily, the film certainly wants us to question his motivations. but i didn't see him as a predator or a creep, really, at least not to the extent my friends did. the desire to be part of something doesn't go away when you turn 18, and it's not like there's a minors-only internet. the World's Fair is the kind of viral creepypasta challenge that, materially speaking, provokes a lot of artistic expression and experimentation, just as we saw with the likes of Slenderman and the Backrooms. these spaces draw people of all ages for all sorts of reasons, in search of a common community, towards the creation of something Bigger. it's not Good or Bad it just Is, as it always has been. and i think as an adult it's easy to feel like, surely with a subject matter so horrific, minors would want to stay far away right? but that's just not the case. the unfortunate truth of these spaces is that you've got a lot of disaffected kids looking for answers from a lot of disaffected adults who don't know or have forgotten just how easy it is to lose yourself in fantasy when you're young. and of course there's so much awful exploitation and abuse that occurs in those spaces as a result, so i absolutely understand being skeptical of an adult guy talking to an underage girl in that context.
but i don't know if that's what we see in the film. if i remember correctly it's after her plush-destroying incident that he reaches out to her, not as a fellow player of the World's Fair but as an adult who knows it's all fake, and encourages her to find her way back to reality. like everything else in the film, you're given no clear obvious signal that he is A Good Guy or A Bad Guy, he's just A Guy, and we have no choice to project our experiences onto him. do we see a predator, or an adult trying to help a kid who's gone too far? if it's clear her parents and teachers and friends are failing her, and he's maybe the only adult she knows who is inside the conspiracy enough to at least speak the same language, what's the right thing for him to do? once again: you have to find your own answer. life is ambiguous, and no one is as simple as the impression they leave on your computer screen.
that is the terror of We're All Going To The World's Fair. you cannot know who someone is, what they believe, what they're capable of, just from looking at them. from the eye of a webcam, reality is a tantalizingly comprehensible play of archetypes and tropes and character arcs. it's so easy to believe anything you see when it makes you feel something nothing else does. we want our pain and alienation to mean something. we want to be more than cogs in the machine. we all want to go to the World's Fair deep down, because at least if you were trapped in a hellish cycle of demonic torment, you wouldn't have to go to your miserable fucking job anymore.