'We're All Going to the World's Fair' Has Its Roots in the Deep, Dark Internet

[Celerity]

Director Jane Schoenbrun was inspired by creepypastas and dangerous viral challenges for their new movie.

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/were-all-going-to-the-worlds-fair-jane-schoenbrun-director-interview



There is an internet adage about online self-expression called Poe's Law that goes something like this: It is virtually impossible to tell from the tone of someone's text on social media whether or not they're being sincere. Anyone can post anything online, truth or fiction, and without any indicators to the contrary, their words can be seen as sincere just as easily as they can be taken as parody. This is the lens through which director Jane Schoenbrun conceived their new film We're All Going to the World's Fair, which follows a young teen girl who becomes embroiled in a viral internet horror challenge.

For those who are expecting something like screenlife horror movie Host, World's Fair is a different creature entirely, focusing instead on the bizarre, grimy, beautiful, and fascinating culture of the internet rather than supernatural scares. Schoenbrun, who is nonbinary, is preoccupied with forms of online self-expression in all forms, and the ways in which the things we see on the internet have the power to warp reality. They wrote their own wiki for the "World's Fair challenge" that young Casey (Anna Cobb) records herself entering in the opening scenes of the film, reciting a phrase and performing a ritual, promising to document on video any "changes" she feels or sees in herself. The film has a limited release this weekend in New York and Chicago and will go nationwide and on-demand on April 22, and HBO Max has picked up the rights for, likely, a streaming release later this year.

Because the film draws from so many niche interests from the digital world, Schoenbrun took us through a number of their influences while creating the dreamy, creepy story of Casey and her fellow World's Fair challenger, a man who goes by the initials JLB (Michael Rogers). No stranger to creepypastas, online challenges, and manufactured internet personalities—Schoenbrun previously made an archival documentary about viral internet boogeyman Slenderman—they were more than happy to describe the online phenomena that got under their skin.



One of the core rules, literally in [the r/nosleep] disclaimer section, it says, "Everything is true here, even if it's not." The idea being that you can't say, like, "A ghost just killed me, I just happen to be writing that." You have to say, "I'm pretty sure I just saw a ghost." And then somebody else could say, "Holy shit, I just saw that ghost, too, and I took a photograph of it," and share a doctored photograph. The way that this space conflates truth and fiction, I think is really, really, really interesting. But it's also one of these mediums that—the classical period of creepypasta on the internet, which I'd say is kind of over now, around the era of Slenderman and Jeff the Killer, or whatever—it can feel a bit like a one-trick pony. There are only so many ways you can take that idea and do something fresh with it.

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