The School is Watching (2015) dir. Jane Schoenbrun

This short isn’t a horror film per se, more literally a found art project. Plenty of awkwardness, humor – intended and otherwise (I’m curious to learn more about the basketball team’s victory over cancer), and fabulous 90s video toaster effects. If there’s an undercurrent of horror, it’s in the inference of bad possibilities to be realized. A girl casually tells a story of embarrassment in way that seems blind to the real problem. American jingoism and the worst propensities for bullying meet in a sketch about Saddam Hussein. These are fleeting things, created to be remembered and regretted by a select few – things that would take on extra weight and scrutiny if broadcast on the Internet instead.

Schoenbrun is becoming more known for unconventional, creeping horror, with an aesthetic rooted in online archeological projects and a weary eye toward the Internet’s propensity for holding on to the world’s media and regurgitating it in new contexts. With videos created whole cloth to resemble an obscure section of cult pop culture (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow), it’s the interaction with the characters that give the videos their context. But in their films based on videos exhumed from anonymous dark corners of the web (here and A Self-Induced Hallucination), the excerpts can arrive with an uncanny emptiness. With these the viewer fills the role of the character giving meaning to the reclaimed A/V detritus, and how “The School is Watching” plays no doubt reflects each person’s own relationship to high school.

If nothing else it makes me grateful to have had my own pubescent foibles lost under the sands of time, for my embarrassing moments of growth – even harmless snapshots of them – to evaporate rather than live for years and decades on a server somewhere. Having the whole school watch is a rush, but the ability to have the school look away can be a gift, too.

(Hat tip to Greta The Narrator for pointing this one out!)