Jane Schoenbrun’s Queer, Erotic Reinvention of the Slasher

Two things have, thus far, been true of a Jane Schoenbrun feature film – its title will be wordy and it will function as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, the director captured feelings of dislocation and dysphoria seldom committed to screen. The latter, in particular, was a harrowing cry from the gut, a raw unspooling of Schoenbrun’s relationship with gender. Their willingness to tackle these emotions has generated a raft of impassioned responses, only cementing their place as one of the decade’s most compelling and rigorous new filmmakers.

Today, Schoenbrun is at the tailend of a long press run for their new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a bloody and erotic tribute to the slasher genre and the perverse path such films sent them down. “We’re in the final lap of the marathon now,” Schoenbrun says, speaking over Zoom. “We opened in New York last Friday and I’ve gotten a little bit of rest. You’re catching me a little fresher than I would have been a week ago.” 

Presented under the comforting prestige of MUBI and starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma smuggles some of the genre’s most radical, transgressive commentary into its slasher framework. Its intellectual lineage runs through Carol J Clover, whose 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws remains an essential blueprint for thinking about gender and identification in horror and helped bring the term ‘final girl’ into the mainstream. Was Schoenbrun an acolyte of slasher film theory?  “I read Men, Women and Chain Saws in a college class centred on the profane in cinema,” says Schoenbrun. “This was 20 years ago and I didn’t consider myself trans at the time. I’ve always had a very analytical mind, I’m sensitive to symbols and more interested in how symbols work rather than what they’re symbolising. Clover saw slasher films as being ‘hermaphroditic’ – the way the final girl stabilises these two poles of identification while the killer leers and takes in the object of the feminine body, punishing it, is fascinating to me.” 

Linda Williams’s work also educated Schoenbrun on the technical foundations of the films they grew up loving. “The Michael Myers breathing point-of-view shot in Halloween was a key one. I took the libidinal ideas beneath it really seriously.” Schoenbrun would become interested in “a post-Judith Butler reimagining” of horror film theory. “There’s something in Men, Women and Chain Saws that disappoints me; it doesn’t consider the possibility that the ‘hermaphroditic gaze’ could be something real.” 

In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, when Kris (Einbinder) meets Billy (Gillian Anderson), the syrup-voiced star of the original film, the pair gently clash over their attitudes to cinema. Billy tells Kris that she overintellectualises slashers, that the richness of film – no matter how lowbrow – lies squarely in the experience. How does Schoenbrun, on the last leg of the promotional tour, feel about endlessly discussing a film that should be experienced viscerally? “It’s been funny. I’ve been thinking about my relationship with the film because I can’t help but glimpse at some negative reviews that are like, ‘oh, the film stays in its head’. Yeah, in a lot of ways, it does stay in its head! It’s clearly made by someone who spends a lot of time in their head. I’ve now done a few press tours and I do think, obviously, there are diminishing returns in talking about my own work or trying to create a guide through which the movie can be deciphered. That’s what the movie is – it’s my best shot at being articulate, and the medium of film can communicate in so many better ways than words on a page can. I understand the David Lynch school of thought: the film is the explanation.”

The last time I spoke to Schoenbrun – in 2024, for I Saw the TV Glow – they described themself as having “won” their poker game with Hollywood. Does it still feel that way? “I don’t know if there’s winning, you know? Clearly, I got to make this movie, so I won the hand. But I was thinking about it this morning – the system of culture-making that I’m working within is not leading us anywhere good as a society. I am trying to push forward into something that can result in a change of relationship with entertainment.” It helps that Schoenbrun feels more established now. “I don’t feel like I’m starting over every time I start a new project. The project is ongoing and clearly spreading. I just hope I can keep my gaze centred on the prize, which is not making the most popular movie or winning an Oscar – it’s to provide some kind of good from within a system that produces a lot of bad.” 

It’s invigorating that a film as slyly transgressive as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma got made at all. “It does feel like a heist every time,” Schoenbrun admits. “It’s this years-long game of chicken, with yourself as much as anyone, thinking: ‘am I actually going to pull this off?’” Schoenbrun has long been drawn to cinema that feels illicit, like David Cronenberg’s Crash. “The thrill of Crash is that I literally can’t believe it exists. How is it possible? There’s something exciting about answering that question by making the kind of movie that shouldn’t exist within that structure, but somehow sneaks in.” 

The filmmaker recently revealed that, after the success of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair in 2021, they were, like Kris, offered the keys to a geriatric franchise – the Leprechaun movies. In another, perhaps better world, we would have seen Schoenbrun’s blending of intensely personal gender dysphoria with a B-movie about an evil leprechaun hunting down his pot of gold. If that was not to be, what about another adaptation? “I’m doing Black Hole [an adaptation of Charles Burns’ comic series for Netflix] but that won’t be a faithful adaptation,” they say. “I don’t know if I should say this … but I just took a meeting for the A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot because that one would be fascinating to do. I’m very picky about those kinds of meetings. I only take meetings if it’s something I can actually imagine spending a lot of time and energy on.”

For the moment, Schoenbrun is done with excavating their own identity for material. “I feel I’ve exhausted a linear progression of each film connecting to a discrete part of my personal trans journey,” they say. “I want to explore different processes in the work that is derived from my brain. I’m open to pushing myself as an artist and I’m entering a phase of my filmography where it just becomes about challenging myself in different ways.” 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is out in UK cinemas from 21 August.