The Horrifying Loneliness of Growing Up Online: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
A cheese stick wrapper crinkles in the mundane soundscape of a bedroom—the click of a light switch, creaking floorboards, rustling sheets. A young teenager meanders the room, a stuffed animal tucked under her arm, and sits at her desk, her innocent face aglow with computer light. “Hi guys,” she says. “Casey here. Welcome to my channel. Today, I’m gonna be taking the World’s Fair Challenge.”
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair portrays the story of isolated teenager Casey (Anna Cobb) who immerses herself in an online role-playing horror game. As the film unveils, fiction and reality blur, creating a psychological horror that captures the complexities of coming-of-age in the internet era and the poisonous nature of loneliness.
Casey’s loneliness infects the movie. There are only two characters in the film, and Casey is never in the same physical space as them. The movie spends most of its time in Casey’s bedroom, a dimly lit attic covered in glow-in-the-dark stars, and the extent of her in-person interactions is a voice from another room cursing at her to be quiet. The greater town of abandoned strip malls, dirty snow, and neverending roads, further sets a grim backdrop anytime Casey ventures outside. This complete isolation allows us to understand why the internet is her only community and thus a key aspect of her coming-of-age story.
The World’s Fair Challenge that Casey participates in is, at its core, an internet creepypasta. It’s supposed to bring mysterious and terrifying changes to one’s life, and Casey seems to welcome the change in her lonesome monotony. The clips of the challenge we see are of distorted audios and cheesy clown costumes, punctuated by clips of Casey watching as she eats dinner in a dark room or lies in bed. Some of the clips are just strange, a man running on a treadmill slapping himself and a plastic woman pouting at herself in the mirror, reminiscent of the uncanny creepypasta videos you find after 2 AM on YouTube.
Here, Schoenbrun establishes their audience as one who grew up with, or was even raised by, the internet. This film asks for an audience who has stayed up late watching scary videos online and knows the feeling of catching sight of your own reflection after hours of doomscrolling. Casey’s world is the internet we know and use every day. She watches comforting ASMR videos to fall asleep and cautiously approaches interactions with a faceless stranger engaging with her content. Unfortunately, the same audience who has grown up with the internet has also grown up with isolation, trapped inside for months as a pandemic raged. We should understand what it’s like to be Casey’s shoes, to have an entire life or community online and to still be utterly alone.
After officially entering into the World’s Fair Challenge, Casey tells her viewers that she begins feeling like she is watching her actions from across the room, sharing with a grim smile that if she was standing in front of a car, “I might be aware that the car’s coming, but I would just stay there.” Casey’s actions throughout the movie leave us asking ourselves if this out-of-body feeling is really a supernatural effect of the challenge, as one might expect from a horror movie, or if it is a side effect of Casey’s loneliness. In one chilling scene, she stares at a gun in its case, her face not betraying anything about how she is feeling. In another, she smiles at nothing in the middle of the night with eyes wide open, blurring the line for the audience on whether her experiences reflect a dark reality or just a spooky possession.
As her out-of-body experiences intensify, and her videos even threaten violence, an older man named JLB (Michael Rogers) begins contacting Casey. He makes distorted versions of her videos, telling her, “I’m worried about you.” When JLB begins to realize that this might not be a game to her, he asks if she understands the challenge isn’t real, and she cuts him off. While our questions about JLB’s true motives are never answered—Was he intending to groom her? Was he just a lonely old man?—we see scenes of him leading a similarly isolated life: drawing, making warm milk, and watching World’s Fair Challenge videos. His perspective demonstrates an important risk of coming-of-age on the internet—we never truly know other people’s intentions. Casey let her relationship with JLB feed into her “in-game” experiences and was ultimately shocked when the stranger tried to break the illusion she built, reflecting the inconsistency and unreliability of the relationships we build online.
In the end of the film, we are stuck in JLB’s perspective, left to wonder about what happened to Casey with only a final message from her: “I swear, someday soon, I’m just gonna disappear, and you won’t have any idea what happened to me.”
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is not your traditional horror movie. The goriest thing about it is a bloody finger, but the atmosphere is still suffocating. It is painfully aware of your expectations when you watch a horror movie, and it uses them against you. During agonizing silences, you wait for the jump scare, but you are instead left with Casey’s gaping sadness, forced to watch her struggle to stay tethered to reality and hoping that this is all just a game to her. Alongside its story about Casey’s loneliness, the film reminds us of the allure of the internet. We have all lived through times of isolation, and sometimes the internet can feel like our only solace, for better or for worse. It can both be full of new ideas and thriving communities, and it can act as an echo-chamber for your worst thoughts and experiences. For Casey, as illustrated by her descent into violent thoughts, the internet was the latter. Like the many online friends who mysteriously disappeared years ago, we don’t know what happened to Casey, and we can only hope for the best.
Remarkably beautiful and unsettling, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair puts words to a quiet suffering, recognizing and validating the toll the internet is having on an entire generation. Despite leaving us in the dark, the end of the film also leaves us with an important insight: We are not alone.