We’re All Going To The World’s Fair: Whoever’s Watching

Scary movies about malevolent technology can be a risky proposition. Something that seems absolutely contemporary when it comes out can feel hilariously dated maybe a year or two later, and this is especially true of anything having to do with the Internet. If the writer or director isn’t familiar with Internet culture, it becomes very apparent very quickly and then you’re just watching it for the irony because it’s almost impossible to take seriously.

So I think that We’re All Going To The World’s Fair works as well as it does because it’s not a film that posits the Internet as some kind of malevolent entity as much as it is just a fact of everyday life, but one with very specific consequences. It’s not a film about technology, it’s a film about the effect of technology on people. It’s a film about loneliness and the difficulties of connection in an age of social media, draped in the trappings of a horror film.

It opens on a teenage girl’s bedroom. Not an especially unusual one - it’s cozy, decorated with fairy lights, tidy but not overly so. And very quickly, we realize our point of view is this girl’s webcam. Her name is Casey, and she’s making a video, possibly to share on YouTube. She’s looking at us, and we’re looking back at her, except she’s not really looking at us, she’s looking at an audience, the audience she assumes will be watching this. She tells us (or rather, whoever will be watching) that she’s going to take “the World’s Fair Challenge.” This involves drawing a small amount of blood and repeating over and over “I want to go to the world’s fair, I want to go to the world’s fair.” See, when you do this, you become part of a community centered around all of the people who have taken this challenge, and begin experiencing strange transformations shortly afterward. They share videos documenting their transformations and experiences. But it’s okay, she’s got her stuffed lemur Poe to keep her safe through whatever happens next.

And soon enough, she begins to feel alienated, separated from her body. Like something else is beginning to inhabit it, and all she can do is watch.

The specifics are a little murky here, it’s described as “an online horror game,” but it isn’t really presented as such - it’s closer to something between a TikTok challenge, an ARG, and urban legends as old as Bloody Mary and as relatively recent as Ben Drowned. Possibly it’s a collective form of storytelling. But this is really nitpicking, because it’s really just the pretext for everything that comes after. This film takes place in a world that seems profoundly empty. It’s a world of houses separated by wide swaths of land, highways passing through stretches of strip malls and the shells of abandoned big-box stores, cars speeding by on their way to someplace else, anyplace else. Casey wanders this bleak landscape, apparently unburdened by school or friends. Her father exists only as a voice shouting angrily from offscreen and as a set of headlights pulling up into the driveway as Casey finishes the dinner she made for herself, seated alone at a dining-room table. Her life is on her computer, where she makes videos that she uploads for people to respond to, as she responds to their videos. It’s easy to imagine this being a world of people inside, alone, staring into glowing screens, looking for some kind of contact. In the very rare instance that there’s more than one person in a frame, the other is inevitably obscured - a shadowy figure walking by in the background, or a crowd of people seen only as a faceless blur. In this world, Casey is an island, unmoored and adrift.

Really, it’s a story about lonely people broadcasting their experiences to whoever’s watching, a careful look at the dissonant confluence of intimacy and performance that is social media. Casey’s videos catch the attention of someone who runs a channel about the challenge, what he refers to as “endgame-level content,” and their conversations are the only instances we have of Casey actually talking to another human being. In lesser hands, this would be a simple Internet-predator story, the challenge being some kind of snare for unwitting minors. But, thank goodness, it’s nothing that obvious or cliched. It really does seem like Casey is experiencing some kind of transformation, something like possession. But it also seems like she’s struggling with feelings that maybe she can’t even really articulate, a sense of loss for something she doesn’t know she’s missing. So the question becomes whether we’re watching her being slowly consumed by some kind of supernatural force, or if she’s an isolated, unstable girl experiencing some kind of catharsis. Is this really happening to her? I mean, something is definitely happening to her, but what? How much of this is real, and how much is performance? How much of Casey is Casey, and how much of it is the game? How much of any of us is real, and how much is performance?

I know that I’m describing in a way that makes it sound pretty cerebral, and that’s because it is. And maybe that’s the kiss of death to a certain kind of horror fan who’d sum it up as “dumb” and “boring” and “slow.” But if they can’t give themselves over to a story, can’t empathize with the characters, and just sit there like a baby bird, waiting to have jump-scares and “brutal kills” regurgitated into their waiting eye-mouths, that’s their fucking problem. There are definitely some very tense, uncomfortable moments of psychological horror, even some body horror, and there’s a real undercurrent of dread throughout. Whatever the reason, it’s clear Casey isn’t safe. But more than anything else it inhabits the world we live in, locates the uneasiness in the way anyone can share themselves with anyone else who’s tuning in without any guarantee of reciprocity or actual connection. You cast these bottles with messages in them out into the dark, and you have no idea who’s reading them, or if anyone is. There’s horror in that.

In some ways it feels like a film that’s going to hit hardest for a particular age range, one of which I am a part - people old enough to remember a time before the Internet, especially as it is today, but young enough to have been an active participant in its earliest years, familiar with those liminal forms of intimacy that could define so much of early Internet culture in a way that feels like just another part of the landscape today. It’s not as harrowing or bleak as, say, Downloading Nancy, but it occupies some of the same space - how much do we really know about each other, what is the difference between knowing someone online and knowing them in real life, what is performance and what is identity when the line between them is so blurred. It’s not scary in the jump-out-and-yell-“boo” sense, but it’s certainly unsettling at points and deeply haunting and melancholy in its end.

IMDB entry
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