[Sundance 2021 Review] We're All Going to the World's Fair is a Creepypasta That's About Making Creepypastas

Fairy tales and folklore as a narrative tradition has existed for hundreds of years. While the term folklore was coined in 1846, the idea of shared stories of cultural mythology dates back to before the advent of Christianity. As rural areas gave way to urban centers and technology became more prevalent, the concept of folklore transitioned into contemporary legends. Urban legends. You know, the kind where you’d awaken in a bathtub filled with ice and you’d be missing a kidney. Or you’d be having a ravishing making out session only to discover the hook of an escaped mental patient on the handle of your car door. 

So it only makes sense as urban sprawl would eventually give way to the internet where MMOs and forums and other ways of sharing a communal stories would eventually give rise to the creepypasta. From Slender Man to Ben Drowned to Candle Cove, these myths and virtual legends mutated and spread across the internet, creating memes, shared stories and, on occasion, full-fledged adaptations like Marble Hornets or, more famously, Channel Zero. But the internet is much larger than the rural communities that created their first folklore or even the big cities that birthed urban legends.

And it’s here that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair operates by both telling a fascinating creepypasta story while also being about urban legends as a whole. 

It’s easy to understand why Casey (Anna Cobb) finds solace in the online world. After a cold open in which she takes the World’s Fair Challenge by pricking her finger, saying “I want to go to the World’s Fair” three times (natch) and then smearing her blood on her screen while watching a hypnotic online video, the film then captures the real world she lives in. A traditional opening credits sequence sits over shots of her town, focusing on the big chain stores like Best Buy as well as the decrepit parking lots left from the bankruptcy of places like Toys “R” Us.

It’s a barren wasteland of commercial buildings and suburban rot. 

Her home life is equally barren as her single father is only ever heard from once and never seen. His presence is unwelcome and Casey does everything in her power not to be around him. In an early moment, she flees the kitchen to eat her dinner alone in her room in the attic when she sees her father’s headlights reflecting in the kitchen window. shine in the window. Later, it’s obvious why she avoids him when we hear him asking her to turn down her music by pounding and shouting, “It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning!” 

The online world is her only refuge from a place that obviously offers no solace or future opportunities, evidenced by a scene in which she leads her viewers through a local graveyard that she maps out as her high school. Contrasting with her bland real life, her online world is filled with ASMR sleeping aid videos and a bunch of people attempting the “World’s Fair Challenge” while documenting their deteriorating conditions. Soon, she’s adding to those videos as she joins the dozens of other players in documenting her slow descent into potential madness.

Along the way, she meets a fellow online friend named JLB (Michael J Rogers), an older man whose intentions towards Casey are a bit nebulous. But he reaches out when he sees her videos and together they begin crafting their own horror story within the confines of the World’s Fair. But is it just a game or is something more sinister going on?

Writer/Director Jane Schoenbrun uses a mix of traditional cinematography and second screen/found footage techniques to explore the way the online world and the real world exist together. This combination of filmmaking styles creates an illusory effect where we’re experiencing the real world as if we’re there and the online world as its filtered through various characters and their online projections. It creates a disorienting effect where we can never truly be certain if what we’re watching is real. It also helps establish the same feeling of constricting loneliness that Casey and the people she meets online are also experiencing; a fractured sense of the duality of self.

But We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is also about the art of crafting a story and Schoenbrun peppers Casey’s narrative with videos that explains the lore and history behind the World’s Fair game. Through videos of video games and post-it notes seen on character’s desk, the film gradually unfurls the story of the World’s Fair is subtle ways. It’s here that I fell in love with Schoenburn’s structure as We’re All Going to the World’s Fair creates its own creepypasta, filled with a historical listing of events that JLB keeps track of and the mysterious people and characters related to it. We watch as the World’s Fair’s story is fleshed out and added to with each new player who are creating their own stories within the larger context of the creepypasta. It explores, through Casey and JLB’s shared story, how communal storytelling takes a kernal of a story and spirals out from there.

The third act seals this concept as it takes a fascinating approach to closing out the story. It showcases how an urban legend continues after the original storytellers have stopped creating it, where the story can take on a life of its own and become a communal experience. It’s an exciting narrative choice that makes We’re All Going to the World’s Fair into something different than a “possession” story or a story about a young woman’s descent into madness.

It becomes a story about the art of storytelling. 

And so we’re back to the creepypastas and the urban legends. What makes We’re All Going to the World’s Fair so exciting is the way it explores how these tales are birthed but also how they feed upon each other. It raises questions about who tells the story and what happens when the story changes perspective? It left me perplexed when I finished and, truthfully, I wasn’t quite sure how I immediately felt about it. But it lingered in my mind for days as I thought about the way it was structured and what it was ultimately trying to say.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is an enigmatic piece of art that will have many diverse thematic readings. It’s not what I expected and it’s ultimately a lot more interesting because of that. Highly recommended.