In recent years, Jane Schoenbrun has emerged as one of the most exciting voices in cinema, with 2021’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and 2024’s I Saw The TV Glow earning them major critical acclaim and a cult following. Now, Schoenbrun is back with their third feature, the brilliantly-titled Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, this time leaning even further into the horror genre with a meta-textual tale of slasher movies, moviemaking, and… well, sex and death.
The film stars Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a director hired to reboot the long-in-tooth ‘Camp Miasma’ slasher franchise. And when Kris connects with Gillian Anderson’s actor Billy Presley, the Final Girl of the original ‘Camp Miasma’ movie, things get seriously twisted. As Schoenbrun tells Empire, it’s another deeply personal work. “I remember feeling when we wrapped, ‘Oh my God, that was the first film that represents all of me,” they explain.
The horror genre continues to be a resonant one for exploring the queer themes embedded in Schoenbrun’s work, with the director noting the “gender fuckery” found in many genre classics. “Norman Bates dressed up in his mother’s clothes, or Buffalo Bill in his skin suit, tucking his penis back and doing his freaky dance — even the movies where there isn’t an explicit transsexual menace, you still get the impression that a Michael Myers or a Leatherface is dealing with all kinds of fucked-up Freudian shit that has something to do with sex and gender deviance.”
But the main required viewing for the Camp Miasma team was Crystal Lake Memories – a near-seven-hour documentary on the making of Friday The 13th, which Schoenbrun screened for their cast and crew. “To me it’s better than Best In Show in [that] it’s a perfect mockumentary, except it’s real,” Scheonbrugn says. Bring on the sex and death.
Read Empire’s full Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma feature in The Odyssey issue, on sale Thursday July 2. Pre-order a copy online here. Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma comes to UK cinemas from August 21.
