Interview: Jane Schoenbrun on ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’
It’s been a genuinely thrilling few years for Jane Schoenbrun. The visionary writer-director first turned heads with their haunting, hauntingly assured 2021 feature debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a quiet, atmospheric coming-of-age tale about a lonely teenager slipping into the vertiginous world of an online horror role-playing game. They followed it in 2024 with the towering, blisteringly assured I Saw the TV Glow, an aching meditation on trans identity, dissociation, and the strange, redemptive power of the media we grew up on and one of the most singular American films of the decade. Now, with their extraordinary third feature Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun completes what has quietly emerged as one of the most vital, emotionally exhilarating, and defiantly personal filmographies working in contemporary cinema.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma centers on Kris (Hannah Einbinder), an enthusiastic young queer filmmaker who has been tasked with resurrecting the fictional, once-beloved 1980s slasher franchise Camp Miasma for a new generation. As part of her research, Kris tracks down the original film’s now-reclusive final girl Billy (Gillian Anderson, in a mesmerising, career-best turn), a fiercely eccentric hermit who still lives on the site of the very summer camp where the films were shot. What begins as a professional pilgrimage soon spirals into something far more unexpected, as the two women fall headlong into a delirious, blood-soaked bond of desire, catharsis, and self-discovery.
A euphoric, gleefully carnal, and deeply personal reclamation of the very slasher tropes that once cast trans and queer bodies as monstrous, Camp Miasma is a wholly triumphant piece of work and, quite tellingly, a marked emotional pivot for Schoenbrun themselves. Where World’s Fair and TV Glow used screens as portals of dissociation, hiding, and quiet anguish, Camp Miasma finally turns that same portal outward, allowing its characters to move through the fantastical and into a fuller, more embodied version of themselves.
For Schoenbrun, the screen as recurring motif has been at the very core of their work from the very beginning. But with each new film, the meaning of that motif has continued to shift and multiply. “It’s obviously a visual motif, metaphor, idea, that I return to over and over again,” they reflect. “From the very beginning, something about surfacing the screen in the work, which is obviously going to be viewed on the screen, and just digging into the multitude of ways that that, as symbol or a way to jump between reality, that’s been there from the beginning. There’s not a straightforward ‘screen equals this’ in the films of Jane Schoenbrun.”
“If anything, I think about being a kid, and I had this dream when I was a kid when I was watching The Simpsons, and I was, like, Bart Simpson on the screen, skateboarding. And it happened, like, fluidly,” they recall. “I feel like there’s this attempt in all of my films to engage with the way that, when we sit in a theater and watch something and enter this new perspective, we are, leaving ourselves. Or something of the process of identity becomes a little less straightforward than we like to think about it in our day-to-day lives. That’s something that, if we look at screens in society, is being used in a multitude of ways, some of which are very sinister, and some of which could potentially be liberatory.”
Rather than resolving that tension in any single direction, Schoenbrun says their body of work will likely continue to hold both meanings at once. Screens as prisons and portals, warnings and invitations, all at the same time. “The screens in my work will probably continue to serve as both prison and portals and probably other things as well,” they explain. “But I do hope that I am defamiliarising the image of the screen through the medium of the screen, to talk about, or try to create, more of a language through which we can talk about identity and reality, and the space between narrative and fiction and life, as more fluid and porous and magical than, you know, our day-to-day life would make us think it is.”
If Camp Miasma is, thematically, a piece with Schoenbrun’s earlier work, it’s also, in its very DNA, a fundamentally different kind of film. A joyful, tender, and gloriously emancipated piece of storytelling that comes from a very different emotional place than either World’s Fair or TV Glow, both of which Schoenbrun has previously described as reckoning films made in the immediate aftermath of coming out. Camp Miasma, by contrast, is a work made squarely from within transition, and one that carries with it all of the euphoria, discovery, and hard-won self-possession of stepping into one’s own body for the first time.
“I’m really proud to be making work from within transition. I’m now six years on HRT, and through what I think of as something of an adolescence in my transition period. Of both, like, great intense turbulence in the way that World’s Fair and TV Glow talk about it, but also a period of a lot of joy and discovery, and stepping into a reality that just felt like the one that I should have been living in my whole adult life, in a really profound and surreal way,” they reflect.
For Schoenbrun, that ongoing evolution (the traceable, changing shape of a filmography made from inside a life still very much in motion) is precisely what makes the work so meaningful, and precisely what they hope audiences will one day be able to look back on as a document of a particular kind of becoming. “I’ve been aware that there aren’t a lot of bodies of work in the film world that are tracing that from within it. In the same way that any filmmaker’s body of work or filmography, you will be able to see them change over time,” they say. “Mine, and especially mine in these years of sort of quote-unquote ‘early transition,’ are tracking a very specific kind of change and coming of age.”
“I’ve just tried to do that honestly. It would corrupt the process if I’m thinking too much about it, except to be really truthful to how it has felt to explore whatever mystery or challenge I am trying to explore in my life and also in my work,” they continue. “This film obviously is coming from a really different perspective. Quite a joyful, still tender and still scary, but emancipated, and perhaps more liberated perspective. What a gift to get to live it, and to get to make it.”
That interplay between joy and residual dread, between reclamation and its ghost, is precisely where much of Camp Miasma‘s emotional charge lives, most piercingly in the film’s tender, aching flashback sequences that follow a younger version of Billy (played beautifully by Amanda Fix) as she navigates the world of the original 1980s slasher franchise. One especially haunting moment sees young Billy accosted by a would-be love interest named Alex, who asks her upstairs; she instinctively says no, before self-correcting to a hesitant, performed yes, doing what she’s been quietly trained to do as a young woman of her time. It’s a fleeting exchange, but one that captures the film’s larger interrogation of the gulf between what a person actually desires and the version of desire they’ve learned to perform.
“That whole section of the film, without Amanda and without her portrayal of young Billy, it would just be pastiche,” Schoenbrun says. “There’s plenty of pastiche in there as well. Plenty of, like, ‘oh wow, the tropes of the horror, the slasher film in the 80s, isn’t that fun?’ And I love that stuff and I’m enjoying it. But there is this almost, like, heartbreaking short story playing out against it, where you have this character, as these final girl characters often are in the movie, the kind of the virgin who fits a little less cleanly into gender roles than everyone else.”
“There’s almost this cruel ritual that’s being enacted, that everyone else kind of effortlessly understands the rules to. She’s a little bit on the outside, but she knows just enough to know the scripts of what she’s supposed to say and what she’s supposed to do. It’s almost like the movie is pushing her against her will a little bit towards these things,” they continue. “But at the same time, she’s still a person with her own inner desire to figure herself out. Queer is the word for it. She’s alienated within the tropes of the culture and the genre, and just, like, lamb to the slaughter in a lot of ways as I think a lot of young queer people are, both in those films and in real life.”
A euphoric, blood-soaked, and defiantly personal third feature that dares to reclaim the very language of the slasher film as an instrument of tenderness, humour, and hard-won joy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the arrival of one of the most singular, exciting, and vital American filmmakers of their generation into the fullness of their creative powers. It cements Schoenbrun as a genuinely essential voice in contemporary cinema, a filmmaker unafraid to interrogate the ugly ghosts of the genres that shaped them while also, finally, allowing themselves and their characters something rarely afforded to any of us: the possibility of pleasure.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now in theaters via MUBI.