If you’ve ever stared at a glowing screen at 3 a.m. and thought, “If something from the internet eats my soul right now, honestly that’s on me,” then We’re All Going to the World’s Fair will feel uncomfortably familiar—in a good way. A weird, slow, unsettling good way.
Jane Schoenbrun’s feature debut is less a traditional horror movie and more a cursed vibe you voluntarily sit inside for 85 minutes. It’s intimate, quiet, and deeply online, like a creepypasta written by someone who has actually used the internet for more than five minutes.
Welcome to the World’s Fair (No Refunds, No Adults)
We start with Casey, played by Anna Cobb in a debut so natural it’s borderline unnerving. She’s a lonely teen in Nowhere, USA, living with a ghost-father who’s mostly off-screen and fully checked out. Her room is her universe: fairy lights, laptop glow, and the quiet hum of isolation.
She takes the “World’s Fair Challenge” the way bored teens take every online challenge that sounds like a bad idea: with a mix of skepticism, curiosity, and a faint hope that something, anything, might finally happen. She says the ritual phrase three times, pricks her finger, smears blood on her laptop screen (peak Gen Z sacrifice), and stares into a strobe-video that feels like it should come with a “this may permanently alter your psyche or at least your sleep schedule” warning.
From there, Casey begins documenting “changes.” The horror is never just “something supernatural is happening.” It’s, “Is something happening at all, or am I just watching a lonely kid slowly roleplay herself off the edge?”
Spoiler: that ambiguity never really goes away. And that’s the point.
Analog Horror in the Age of YouTube
The movie lives in the world of user-generated horror: glitchy YouTube uploads, roleplay channels, and “ARG or someone’s breakdown?” content. Schoenbrun absolutely nails the look and cadence of this stuff—shaky webcams, bad lighting, earnest monologues, and those weird edits where you’re not sure if it’s a joke or a cry for help.
We see other “World’s Fair” participants: people claiming their bodies are turning into plastic, their personalities dissolving, their lives glitching. Are they in on the bit? Are they unwell? Is it a game? A cult? A meme? The film shrugs and says, “Exactly.”
Instead of jump scares, we get the slow horror of watching someone maybe perform trauma… or maybe have trauma… for an invisible audience that may or may not care. It’s creepypasta as emotional self-harm, and the movie is disturbingly good at capturing that dynamic.
Casey: The Horror of Being Seen and Not Seen
Anna Cobb’s performance is the film’s backbone. She never once feels like “an actor playing an awkward teen.” She feels like an actual kid whose videos you’d stumble across at 2 a.m. and then obsess over for days.
Casey is lonely, but not in a melodramatic way. She’s just… drifting. Her dad barely registers. Her social life is her webcam. Her emotional experiments happen on camera: singing, dancing, screaming mid-video for no apparent reason, talking about sleepwalking, guns, and wanting to disappear.
The terrifying part isn’t “Is she possessed?” It’s “Is this what a teen does when the only meaningful feedback they get is from an algorithm and the occasional stranger in the comments?” Casey wants to be consumed—by the game, by the world, by someone. The World’s Fair Challenge is just the only thing that answers.
JLB: Internet Dad or Digital Predator? (Yes.)
Enter JLB, a middle-aged man obsessed with the World’s Fair videos. He reaches out to Casey, tells her she’s “in trouble,” and offers to “monitor” her. Totally normal hobby for a grown man, obviously.
Michael J. Rogers plays him with a perfect mix of awkward concern and deeply questionable boundaries. We eventually see his life: a big house, no family, a lot of time on his hands, and frankly way too much interest in teens performing horror for him online. He insists it’s all about the game, the lore, the story. And maybe it is. That’s the problem.
JLB is both pathetic and frightening. Is he grooming her? Is he genuinely worried? Is he LARPing as a savior in someone else’s mental unraveling? The film carefully refuses to give us a clean answer.
When he finally says, “Let’s step out of the game,” it’s one of the most quietly horrifying moments in the film. Because what’s scarier: a fictional curse, or a real adult wanting something from a lonely kid who can’t quite articulate what she wants herself?
Horror by Way of Emotional Lag
If you go into this expecting a traditional horror movie with rising action, big scare setpieces, and a third-act confrontation, you’re going to feel like you clicked on the wrong video. World’s Fair is horror by accumulation: awkward pauses, half-lit faces, cryptic messages like “YOU ARE IN TROUBLE” over distorted images of Casey, and long, uncomfortable shots of a girl staring into her screen like it’s the only mirror that counts.
One standout sequence: Casey covered in glowing UV paint, tearing apart her childhood stuffed animal on camera. It’s silly, creepy, and heartbreaking all at once. She stops, sees what she’s done, and suddenly the performance drops. The horror isn’t the paint or the toy—it’s that she needed an audience to kill the last visible piece of her childhood.
The movie keeps circling that line: where does roleplay end and self-destruction begin? And if it’s all “just a game,” why does it feel like both participants and viewers are bleeding for real?
The Ending: Did It Happen or Did We Just Want It To?
By the time the film reaches its final stretch, Casey and JLB’s relationship fractures. She breaks character—if it was ever a character—and tells him that it was all fake, that “Casey” isn’t even her real name, and that he’s creepy for projecting so much onto a teenager online. Then she disappears from his life.
Later, in a narrated epilogue, JLB claims she reached out a year later, apologized, explained she’d been in a care facility, and that they finally met in New York while she attended a theater program. She tells him she did go to the World’s Fair that night she vanished and something pulled her back.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s his fantasy. Maybe it’s the ending he has to tell himself so he doesn’t feel like he helped push a lonely kid over the edge.
The film’s last gift is that uncertainty: you decide whether it’s a ghost story, a story about mental illness, or a story about the stories we tell ourselves so we don’t feel complicit. Whichever you pick, it isn’t comforting.
A Digital Campfire Story for Terminally Online Brains
As a horror film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is subtle and patient where most modern genre movies are loud and desperate. It trusts that you know what it feels like to be alone with a screen. It knows that for a certain generation, “I want to disappear and have no one ever figure out what happened” doesn’t sound like a threat from a monster—it sounds like a late-night intrusive thought.
Jane Schoenbrun isn’t making a creepypasta adaptation; they’re dissecting why we crave those stories in the first place. Why lonely kids upload their worst feelings as content. Why lonely adults watch, obsess, and call it “lore” instead of “voyeurism.” Why the line between game and life, fiction and reality, is so easy to cross and so hard to redraw.
It’s a good film not because it explains everything, but because it sits you in the dark with your own need to explain everything—and then quietly refuses to help.
If you’ve ever gone too deep into a weird online rabbit hole and come out feeling like you left a piece of yourself back there, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is the rare horror movie that looks at you and says, “Yeah. Me too.” While smiling in that way where you’re not entirely sure if it’s reassuring… or a warning.
