To put a bow on the many different shows Buddy references—like Barney & Friends and Pee-wee’s Playhouse—Kelly filters it through an old TV aesthetic. An upbeat opening number features the kids in the show (back when they were worry-free), scenes shift through transition wipes few editors today would use, and end credits scroll over the closing song, breaking the film up into “episodes.” The meta format isn’t just a part of the movie’s aesthetics, it’s a key plot device: Buddy, the disturbed unicorn that hosts the show, needs the end credits to return him to his original state after he’s damaged by the kids trying to escape. Buddy also uses the retro TV look to delineate different spaces. Once the kids are on the other side of Buddy’s fence, that aesthetic is gone, and they embark on a new journey through a dark, digitally crisp forest.
Likewise, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms switches between what looks like film and video formats. Set in the 1990s, Backrooms sees characters film a commercial with a camcorder, playing with the gear the way many people used them for no-budget, homegrown ads for local businesses. It’s a silly moment but, when it comes time to prove the existence of this eerie architectural hell that seemingly doesn’t end, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) uses that same camera, enlisting his employee and her boyfriend to film the Backrooms. They create a grainy movie-within-the-movie, exploring the space with a hauntingly lo-fi view, channeling movies from the time like The Blair Witch Project—as well as newer films like Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, which turned digital footage into grainy horror—before jolting the audience back to contemporary aesthetics.
The movie-within-a-movie format also appears in Jane Schoenbrun’s latest two features, I Saw The TV Glow and Camp Miasma, playing with the format and visual conventions of ’90s TV shows and ’80s slashers with a twist. For I Saw The TV Glow, Schoenbrun created The Pink Opaque, a quasi-Buffy tribute that looks appropriately aged, with characters in retro clothes and sinister villains—all filmed to look like it’s on tape, with TV bars across the screen to make the sequence look older. Two lonely children bond over their love for The Pink Opaque, the glow from the television lighting up their faces as if restoring life to them through their new obsession. Years later, when Owen (Justice Smith) revisits The Pink Opaque, it doesn’t look as cool or scary. It’s cheesy and goofy, a tangible reflection of how fans grow out of the media they love. The show has lost its glow for Owen, and as he ages, life has drained from him in turn.
Schoenbrun continues playing with this idea in their latest film, where they created an entire horror movie franchise. The image quality of these fictional older films are made to look aged, with the dark grainy look of something cheaply filmed in the ’80s. As the world of the horror franchise bleeds into its version of reality, the movie begins to feature matte paintings and other practical effects to create classic Hollywood movie magic. Soon, present and past aesthetics begin to combine, with modern camera movements and cartoonish blood splatters following in Little Death’s wake. The boundaries between reality and the screen are deliriously blurred, like when supporting characters in the town’s gas station lose their color and clarity as if they had stepped out of a faded TV screen. The most ambitious and complex use of this technique of this recent crop, Schoenbrun’s film recreates an older visual format as both a reference and meta conceit, using recognizable aesthetic details to detach their story from reality.
For filmmakers, recreating the past look of old recordings and broadcast-quality TV shows is a part of the story they’re telling, whether that involves an immersive, bizzaro kids’ program or the limits of consumer video technology making a liminal space all the scarier. In a digital age, returning to these older aesthetics, not just in set design but in cinematography, offers an immediate, tactile visual difference from what audiences are used to, which therefore makes these films appear more real than those fully committed to crisp, easily manipulated digital images. Fully returning to that sense of retro terror plays on the audience’s collective memory of that time, which means that any variation or distortion feels even more jarring. The image quality isn’t as sharp, the colors aren’t as clear, and childhood memories are no longer sacred.
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