Six Slasher Films That Gave Director Jane Schoenbrun’s Meta-Horror Movie ‘Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Its Edge
To be a fan of horror is also to be a scholar, versed in the codes, rules, and lore that make the movies tick—and Jane Schoenbrun might as well have a PhD. Their new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, out August 7, is a winking meta-slasher, both an exaltation and an academic audit of the genre and all its time-honored tropes and sexual subliminals.
The film stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an indie filmmaker tasked with rebooting the Sleepaway Camp-coded Camp Miasma franchise, which prompts her to track down the original film’s Final Girl, Billy, a glamorous recluse played by Gillian Anderson. As the two get to unpacking their respective relationships to the Miasma movies (and their archly-named killer, Little Death), subconscious fears and desires rise to the surface that can’t be outrun. What begins as a send-up of Hollywood reboot culture stuffed with tongue-in-cheek cinema-studies banter gradually sheds its scholastic skin and leans in, giving way to a panting, sensual phantasmagoria that climaxes in an explosion of red corn syrup.
As in their previous films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow, Miasma finds Schoenbrun wearing their influences boldly on their sleeve—a bit of Lynch, a dash of Cronenberg—as they more broadly explore our relationships to the media we consume. Miasma is particularly interested in the refractive link between image and desire: how does media shape our fantasies, and in turn, our fantasies shape media?
To that end, we sought to study Schoenbrun’s own relationship to the genre: they recently shared with us their personal slasher syllabus, breaking down the formative films (reboots included!) that influenced the making of Miasma.
Psycho (1998)
Universal/Everett Collection
Jane Schoenbrun: It was really derided when it came out. I think it won some Razzies or whatever. It’s a fun cast. It’s an incredibly faithful shot-for-shot remake of the original film, keeping all of the ’50s pastiche, but kind of casually updated for the ’90s. It’s so campy to see these people doing late ’50s, early ’60s sort of glammy dialogue in this contemporary setting. At the time, everyone was like, “Why did you do this?” but I found it so fascinating on rewatch.
At that point, [Gus] Van Sant was known as a part of the New Queer Cinema movement, but he was just about to have his most interesting creative period, which was in the 2000s when he made Elephant, Paranoid Park, Last Days, and Gerry. If you watch these films, they’re intensely technical. I almost think of them as geographic films. They’re mostly interested in space and technique.
