Jane Schoenbrun comes to play in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a love letter to slasher movies of the past that may be indefensible, but still command a curious power to stoke sexual awakenings.
The writer-director’s third feature embraces beauty and chaos, confusion and contradiction. One of its co-leads, Gillian Anderson, notes that making any movie is a risk — “but this is really a risk.”
It all comes to a head in a mid-point, single-shot set piece in which a lovable, nonbinary serial killer named Little Death unleashes geysers of blood from the bodies of sweaty teens to the strains of a plaintive ’90s ballad.
It doesn’t sound like it should work, but it does, on the most basic, hormonal level. Like a good slasher should.
”It was always written to be this tightrope that was choreographed like this dance that’s just an absolute fucking massacre, but it’s also almost like a ballet,” says Schoenbrun.
There’s a gusher of analysis about the slasher genre: the foreplay, the penetration, the way the films condemn or reinforce different points along a sexual spectrum, and what it all means, and whether it’s OK.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma frames it all through the artistic and sexual journey of Kris, an intellectual and ambitious filmmaker played by Hannah Einbinder.
“Jane is someone who’s such a visionary, a once-in-a-generation filmmaker, and knowing their work, I was so excited that there was a part that would be right for me,” says Einbinder, who recently wrapped the fifth and final season of her Emmy-winning role on HBO’s Hacks.
“And then when I was able to read the script, I just felt so tied to Kris’ experience in their own body, and also like their relationship to sex felt like such an important one to communicate in the way that I think only film can.”
Shoenbrun grew up in a small town outside New York City, devoted to horror and late ’90s shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files, which provided an escape from a confusing adolescence in which they felt left out of many gender-defined rituals of teenage life.
Schoenbrun once told MovieMaker that transitioning helped them move from “being in the audience of my life to being on stage.”
The writer-director gained wide acclaim for 2022’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow.
But with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, they get to explore their fascination with fandom and how our stories shape us on a much greater scale. The film is produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B and distributed by MUBI, a streaming service specializing in showcasing emerging auteurs.
Casting Anderson, the X-Files’ Agent Scully, is one of its many big swings.
“There’s something subtly meta about this person who we know from such an iconic show as The X-Files, which I watched when I was a kid,” says Schoenbrun. “The role is self-consciously written to kind of play on that iconography. But I think beyond that, I just felt that there is this high femme elegance that feels like from another age; not the ’90s or the ’80s, but from classic Hollywood.
“I was really excited about challenging her to do something really vulnerable,” Schoenbrun continues. “I do think the performance, even though it’s obviously so campy and larger than life and so mannered, is revealing something of herself in a way that I find to be deeply vulnerable and complicated.”
Anderson put her trust in Schoenbrun because she was so impressed by I Saw the TV Glow — and was even more moved by the Miasma script.
“I trusted them because of their obvious commitment to this, and also how much of their own heart, and life experience, and joy, and trauma, and everything, has gone into it,” says Anderson, an Emmy winner for both The X-Files and The Crown. “I was there to be of service, in a sense: Do with me what you will, because I believe in your vision, and I want this to be everything that you’ve wanted it to be.”
Jane Schoenbrun on Play in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma nods to the Friday the 13th franchise and many other horror classics, including Sleepaway Camp, a cult 1983 film whose surprise ending is widely debated, especially among LGBTQ+ horror fans.
Kris is tasked with reviving a film-within-the-film called Camp Miasma, a zombie IP that has been walking dead through a dozen mindless sequels. So Kris seeks out Anderson’s Billy, who starred in the original Camp Miasma, a seamy, steamy fright flick in which Little Death (Jack Haven) seeks vengeance on bigoted camp counselors.
Billy now lives at the dreamy camp where Camp Miasma was shot, and may or may not have an ongoing relationship with Little Death, who may or may not be real, and may or may not be lurking under the water, waiting to thrust a spear through the young director.
Little Death is named after the translation of the famous French idiom for orgasm, and the film explores violence, desire and Kris’ elusive search for sexual satisfaction. Kris confesses to Billy about being unable to have an orgasm with a partner, and struggling to relax and be present during sex.
“I have more often than not experienced that,” says Einbinder. “I think many people have, and I think it’s okay to be honest about that. And frankly, doing it felt really healing. The film is kind of like a road map, at least for like the beginnings of a journey to reckon with that.”
The film looks at how the pressures and expectations around sex are exacerbated in an era when so many people learn about it from screens.
“It’s the heart of the movie in many ways,” says Schoenbrun. “And there is this conversation around the language of cinema and how it replicates the thing that is intangible and infinitely deep in our relationship, individually and culturally, to sex.
“It’s also where the movie came from,” they continue. “This isn’t a movie just about anxiety around sex as a trans person. I think that that topic transcends identity. Culturally, we have a really, really unhealthy and weird relationship — especially in America — to sex. A lot of anxiety that I too felt in those early years post transition, it’s what I was exploring and working on, and trying to learn how to heal a little bit. I knew that I wanted to make a movie about that.”
Schoebrun notes that “no genre has such stringent anxiety about sexuality as the slasher genre does.”
“We have so many examples, from Buffalo Bill to Norman Bates, of gender deviance,” they explain. “But we also have this genre that’s so deeply obsessed with the ritual of sex. And I knew that if I was going to talk about this in a way that could actually reach people, I needed to have that conversation in a way that felt safe and almost fun. Not like, ‘Let me sit you down and talk about how fucked up we all are.’”
Jane Schoenbrun, Hannah Einbinder, and Gillian Anderson on Risk
Schoenbrun had tight control over most elements of the production.
“It was really clear they had thought about every single frame of this film to the nth degree, on such a micro level,” Anderson says. “I’d arrive on set and they were ready to go. I mean, they were ready, as in, ‘Let’s shoot,’ and we hadn’t walked it, we hadn’t rehearsed it, we hadn’t anything. I think that’s because they’d seen it so many times in their head already about how it was going to go, that it almost already existed.”
But Schoenburg did feel vulnerable in one area.
“I had never directed sex scenes before, and I was absolutely terrified to do it,” they say. “I realized that I was having the kind of anxiety around directing those scenes that I had the very first time I directed my very first movie, about directing itself, and that my anxiety was like stopping me from looking right at what I was doing, because I was too in my head, which, ironically, is exactly what the movie is about.
“The movie is about getting out of your head and getting comfortable in your body. I realized through the collaboration with Hannah and Gillian and our really wonderful intimacy coordinator [Aryn Mott], that we were all consenting to what we were doing. We all had the same desire, which was to do something really vulnerable and scary — the two of them in front of the camera, me behind it. And once I realized that, the thing that was scary about it became the thing that was exciting about it.
“I realized that my deepest job on the film was to look right at it emotionally; to not direct from a place of shame, but from a place of vulnerability and bravery.”
Einbinder credits the conversations with Schoenbrun as the most important prep work to shoot those scenes.
“Jane and I had tons of conversations, not even necessarily about the dialogue of that scene, but of the subject matter, and what it was exploring,” Einbinder recalls. “And in those conversations, we both told personal stories, and I really got a sense for and became close to how that feels.
“In engaging with the material, I had to access a lot of stuff that I had experienced personally,” Einbinder continues. “I know it’s so corny when actors are like ‘That was therapy for me,’ but it actually was.”
Schoenbrun adds: “We supported each other through it. We really communicated; we made sure we were all feeling okay through it. And I think the thing that was captured because of that feeling of trust and that feeling of not being afraid to do what we were doing is really reflected in the film.”
Anderson agrees, specifically pointing to Einbinder’s ability to channel pure panic during the film’s intimate, bloody climax.
“I’ve had severe panic attacks throughout my life, and she was absolutely right there in the moment, which I think was kind of essential,” Anderson explains. “It’s so obvious to me, after the fact, how important that is for the integrity of the film, because when anyone is going through that themselves, it’s so fucking real.
“Whether it’s related to sex or social anxiety, or mental health issues, or whatever it is, you feel like your world is imploding, and that you are going to go mad, and so I think actually the choice that she made to put herself in that place was really, really important.”
Anderson notes that it’s possible for viewers “to go there and come out the other side and find joy.”
“I think that’s an important message, and I think that’s the message behind Jane’s transition, and that’s part of what this whole exercise is about: finding joy in one’s differences, finding acceptance of self and acceptance of other. And that there can be play. Play is not frivolous. Play is important.”
Jane Schoenbrun on Choreographing Kills
Cut back to that mid-movie set piece, in which Little Death does the slice-and-dice though a slew of drunk, high, horny teenagers, to the sounds of a needle-drop we won’t reveal here. (You can find the song’s title, if you like, in sideways small print on the last page of our latest issue.)
“We’ve talked a lot about the fun of flesh and fluids — now let’s bathe in them, and putting it at the exact middle of the movie felt like the right moment for the way the movie achieves velocity,” Schoenbrun says.
“In the script, I also wrote, ‘Now we enter the most ambitious shot of the movie.’ And I put that there as a message to my team to say, this is one that we can’t half-ass.
“It was a lot of fucking work, is the short story,” the filmmaker says of the sequence.
The massacre is presented as a scene within the original Camp Miasma, in which Amanda Fix (about whom you can read more on page 14) plays the young Billy.
“I think we must have spent like a good 100-plus hours in prep just on that sequence and just on all of the interdepartmental needs that we’re going to need to be meticulously coordinated to pull that off,” Schoenbrun says.
“We went to all of the sets and filmed run-throughs of it on cell phones, and then edited that together to the song to make sure we were hitting all our marks. And we were timing things to the millisecond to make sure they lined up with the moments in the song. We were talking a ton between practical effects and special effects, and costumes, and stunts.
“It was just this huge undertaking, and this real proof of concept of, like, if I can do this, I’ve leveled up in terms of craft with my team, and I think everyone felt that way.”
Schoenbrun adds: “One thing I’ve learned is that if you surround yourself with the right people, with artists who want to be pushing themselves, something that’s a huge challenge like that is going to actually be way more exciting to them than just doing another shot, reverse-shot, coverage scene. So, everyone was just game.”
And after countless listens, Schoenbrun still hasn’t tired of the song.
“I think that that song is one of the few that I could have spent those hundreds of hours with and not gotten tired of,” they add. “I still love it just as much as I did. It’s just perfect. … It’s a song about a kind of well-earned triumph, or resilience leading to joy, which is what the movie is about.”
Gillian Anderson on When a Film Is Working
Audiences have been extremely receptive to the vision. In May, attendees of the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival gave it a standing ovation. Reviews, as of this writing, have been uniformly positive.
Was there a particular moment when Anderson knew the film was working?
“You never know until an audience gets to experience it, and you get to experience the audience,” she says. “I know people who have been at Cannes and thought that they were delivering the second coming, and people walked out.
“So, to be there and to have the audience respond that way, and to have the continued positive buzz around it, and to have so many different kinds of people respond in exactly the way that it had touched me … it’s been interesting to observe that.”
One of the people most deeply affected by Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasna was its other star.
“I do feel like there are a lot of really amazing things that art can do. It can give you relief, it can make you feel seen and validated, it can be exhilarating and exciting, but it can also change you and make you see yourself differently,” says Einbinder.
“That’s what this did for me, and my highest hope for the film is that other people feel that way.”
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in theaters August 7 from MUBI.
Main image: Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. MUBI
All photos courtesy of MUBI
