I Saw The TV Glow Director To Explore Netflix’s Black Hole

Jane Schoenbrun will direct the long-gestating adaptation of Charles Burns’ body horror comic.

Here’s a reason to be cheerful: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jane Schoenbrun, director of the incredible We’re All Going To The World‘s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow, will direct Black Hole for Netflix. Long in development, the adaptation of Charles Burns’ landmark and much-lauded graphic novel has been given a straight-to-season green light. Absolute winner.

I dig Burns a lot. There’s a framed poster of an exhibition of his artwork on my wall, chiefly because it reproduces the cover art to Iggy Pop’s Brick By Brick. His best known work, Black Hole is, conservatively, an absolute mind blower. First published in inky black and white in 1995, the book charts the spread of an STD through a group of teenagers in suburban Seattle in the ’70s. The wrinkle is that the disease, nicknamed The Bug, inflicts bizarre mutations on its carriers, hence the whole body horror thing. It’s superbly unsettling work and occasionally quite queasy, which is why I gifted it to my best friend when he was recovering from rectal surgery. I’m a giver.

As for Schoenbrun, they made the horror community sit up with their 2021 feature fiction debut, the similarly unsettling We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, before knocking it out of the park with 2024’s I Saw The TV Glow. Schoenbrun’s work deals with themes of identity, sexuality, gender, and transformation, so it’s pretty much a perfect match of creator and material.

Many other filmmakers have tried to mount Black Hole over the years, including Alexandre Aja and David Fincher, but this one looks to be a goer, with Netflix releasing a synopsis:

“There’s an old myth that haunts the seemingly perfect small town of Roosevelt: If you have sex too young, you’ll contract the ‘bug,’ a virus that literally turns you into a ‘monster’ from your worst nightmares. Absurd, right? That’s what Chris always assumed, until, after one reckless night at the beginning of senior year, she finds herself infected. Now she’ll be cast out to the woods to live with the other infected, where a chilling, new threat emerges: a serial killer who’s hunting them one by one.”

Yep, that’s Black Hole, all right.