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Mr. Melancholy, also known as The Man In The Moon, is the main antagonist of both the 2024 psychological horror-drama film I Saw The TV Glow and the fictional 1990s TV series ‘The Pink Opaque’ which exists within the world of the movie.
He is a mysterious extradimensional being (whose existence may or may not be hallucinatory) who has the power to warp time and reality, and who summons strange monsters which threaten the human race and have a tendency to kill or attack children. He personally set the events of the film in motion by cutting out the hearts of two teenage girls with psychic powers, burying them alive, and trapping them mentally in despair-filled false lives.
He is portrayed by dancer and actress Emma Portner.
History[]
The Pink Opaque[]
The time before the events of the movie are revealed in the episodes of The Pink Opaque, which according to the film’s deuteragonist Maddy Wilson, are in fact her and the film’s protagonist Owen’s memories of their true lives before being buried alive and forced to hallucinate the false world that represents the film’s setting. In The Pink Opaque, Mr. Melancholy primarily manifests as a giant face, which is present on The Moon at all times, watching over and tormenting the Earth by sending demons down onto it and warping reality to his whims. Since he is always visible to all of humanity when the moon is in the sky, most people don’t even recognise Mr. Melancholy as anything other than “the man in the moon”, and only people with psychic abilities become aware of his true nature and abilities.
At some point prior to the first episode of The Pink Opaque, a psychic teenage girl named Tara became aware of his existence and was forced to fight his demons Marco and Polo. One day, he summoned Marco and Polo to kill Tara at a summer camp, only for Tara to discover that he has a psychic connection (which she calls The Pink Opaque) with another girl at the camp, Isabel, who had not yet understood that she also possessed psychic powers and was questioning her sanity, as well as how on Earth she knew the name of Mr. Melancholy. After Tara reassures Isabel that she was sane, the two form a very strong bond due to their psychic connection, which had manifested before the pair even met in the form of tattoo-like marks that appeared on the backs of their necks. Isabel and Tara, using their psychic connection to co-ordinate their strategy, are able to defeat Marco and Polo, and go on to consistently defeat various demonic creatures that Mr. Melancholy summons. However, due to them living on the opposite sides of the un-named county they lived in, the pair were forced to do so at long-distance, communicating with each other to help the other person and their friends defeat the creatures he was sending.
After five years, Mr. Melancholy decided to stop tormenting the girls using proxies, and released a psychic signal that revealed to Tara that he was planning to come to the Earth to wreak havoc with reality in person. Tara and Isabel engaged in a psychic meeting, wherein Tara told Isabel that the only way they could possibly defeat Mr. Melancholy was to meet up in person so that they could combine their powers together and fight at full strength. However, what neither Tara nor Isabel realised was that Mr. Melancholy intentionally sent Tara a signal as a trap. The pair agreed to meet by the Lake where they first met, and at last combine their powers. As Isabel ran towards the lake in the forest the night after they agreed to meet, she saw Tara and began to run towards her, only to suddenly start hearing Tara’s voice call out “Help me!” on the psychic plane, a voice which was not coming from the Tara she could see in the distance. The real Tara was pleading for Isabel to help her, being buried alive underground, slowly suffocating to death. Mr. Melancholy had already got to her.
Once Isabel was close enough to the fake Isabel, the fake turned around, revealing himself to be Marco. As Isabel turned to run, Marco and Polo teleported to her side, grabbed her, and dragged her kicking and screaming to a house, where she was confronted with Mr. Melancholy's true humanoid form: a man with a moon-shaped head, the proportions and spot patterning on which was constantly changing. Mr. Melancholy cut out Isabel’s heart and put it in a freezer next to Tara’s, where both hearts are kept alive, beating, due to Mr. Melancholy’s magic. Marco and Polo then force-fed her Luna Juice, which gradually transported Isabel’s mind into a plane of existence called the Midnight Realm
Tara and Isabel's Punishment[]
As the captured Isabel’s mind slipped away, Mr. Melancholy appeared to Isabel for the first time, and told her “don’t fight it, let my poison work its magic. You’re going to love the Midnight Realm. It’s such a wonderful, wonderful prison”. As he told her this, he showed Isabel a glass ball filled with water, within which she saw the life of a young man, Owen (the film’s protagonist) staring at a television. In this moment it is revealed that Owen is in fact Isabel, and the film’s other protagonist Maddy is Tara, and that both of them were sent to live depressing, out-of-order lives, forced to be emotionally detached due to the fact that their hearts weren’t in their bodies, and repeatedly go through severe mental trauma. Mr. Melancholy’s two manifestations then buried Isabel alive and he removed her memories of her real name, her powers, and her heart. His final words to Isabel are “You won’t even remember that you’re dying”, which he says before smiling dementedly, as Isabel’s consciousness completely fades and she becomes Owen. Mr. Melancholy buries Isabel alive, and The Pink Opaque ends.
In The Midnight Realm, Maddy and Owen connect over their love of their favourite TV series, The Pink Opaque, but gradually realise that the events of the show seem more real that the events of their world. In this world (The Midnight Realm), Mr. Melancholy has given “Maddy” (Tara) an abusive father and an absent mother, and has given “Owen” (Isabel) a neglectful father and a mother who is slowly dying of cancer, forcing them both to undergo severe constant mental torment and anguish. When Maddy realised what her life was, she runs away, and after several years out of state, she paid a junkie to bury her alive, and died in a coffin, before waking up in The Pink Opaque, and finding both her and Isabel’s hearts in Mr. Melancholy’s freezer. Returned to reality, Tara stole Luna Juice from Mr. Melancholy’s facility and transported herself back into the Midnight Realm, where she finally made contact once again with Owen and told him about their past lives in the show, and that if Owen buries himself alive in this world, he’ll wake up again as Isabel in the real world. However, Owen is too afraid to bury himself alive, and runs away, slowly realising that he is, in fact, dying, as he was told by Mr. Melancholy many years before, and that what he is perceiving as being years are in fact mere minutes or even seconds, as Maddy had told him.
At the end of the film, Maddy/Tara is implied to have returned to the real world (as she never appears again after pleading with Owen/Isabel to return with her), while Owen/Isabel gradually gets sicker and weaker, sometimes vomiting Luna Juice. Mr. Melancholy never appears again, and is apparently victorious, with Isabel spending the rest of her life slowly dying in a mental prison while her buried body suffocates, living out her final minutes as though they are decades.