We’re All Going to the World’s Fair gives creepypasta fans the exact movie they need

polygon.com:

The internet takes on a different texture once everyone around you has gone to sleep. The world behind the screen expands as the world outside it contracts, becoming a portal to somewhere else. It’s Alice’s Looking-Glass by way of YouTube links. At strange hours, people’s attention is more easily drawn to the internet’s stranger corners, where it’s possible to commune, however indirectly, with the others who are drawn to them too.

In Jane Schoenbrun’s mesmerizing We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, lonely teen Casey (Anna Cobb) spends her time deep in one of those corners. After a long spell of watching videos of other people posting about the World’s Fair, an internet urban legend wrapped around a secret rite of passage, she decides to join in herself. At the start of the film, she sits in her attic bedroom late at night, illuminated by the glow of her laptop screen. She follows each step of the ritual: She pricks her finger, smears the blood on the screen, plays a video, and chants “I want to go to the World’s Fair” three times. Then her journey begins — a journey she naturally documents online, as part of the process of telling a collective story.

According to the legend, once someone participates in the World’s Fair Challenge, as it’s called, they’ll start to change in unpredictable and undefined ways. Something from their deepest fears and nightmares will become literal. The ritual is just the start of the game: Participants are supposed to continue posting videos, documenting whatever changes take place. Eventually, something horrifying might happen. One man becomes an evil clown. Another finds a strange growth on his arm. Casey wonders what might happen to her.

The majority of World’s Fair follows Casey as she