How Jane Schoenbrun Defied the Odds With the Sexy, Bloody ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’

Jane Schoenbrun tends to exhaustively shot-list their movies, arriving each day on set with a rigorously formalist philosophy of filmmaking. But in the making of their newest feature, the director had no real plan for the sex stuff. This was odd since the erotic-signaling title, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, had been rolling around in Schoenbrun’s brain for years — and the story itself was, in the director’s own words, “about learning how to stop dissociating during sex.” Turns out, this necessitated a meta lesson behind the camera. “I realized once we got to production that I had been really avoiding, if not dissociating, from having to direct those scenes,” Schoenbrun says now, in their first in-depth interview about Camp Miasma. “Directing those scenes felt as scary as it felt directing for the first time.”

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Premiering as the opening Un Certain Regard film in Cannes before Mubi releases it in theaters Aug. 7, Camp Miasma hardly feels like a first film. Rather, it reveals a major rising filmmaker at their most assured and ambitious, if still bursting with the tremendously, wildly personal expression of their first two films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Schoenbrun sees this third feature as a natural artistic progression.

“I was very conscious of TV Glow as this moment, both for me as an artist and for me as a person, that came out of a very deep and emotional catastrophe — the early stages of [gender] transition are completely insane and require a feeling like your entire life is either ending or just beginning,” says Schoenbrun, who is nonbinary. “Once I had gotten over the terror of coming out and beginning transition, which is what TV Glow was birthed from, there was a new terror — and it was maybe a more fun terror — of getting to figure out how to be in my body and to have a healthy relationship to sex for the first time in my life.”

Featuring aching, ferocious performances from Emmy winners Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, Camp Miasma imagines the resurrection of a dormant slasher franchise. The playful opening sequence races through the cultural lifespan of the titular series, which launched as a commercial smash and cult critical hit before sequels delivered diminishing returns, then met all kinds of conflicting internet readings that revived interest — while also laying bare the property’s problematic roots. Enter Kris, a budding queer director one might mistake for a Schoenbrun stand-in, who’s been hired to bring Camp Miasma back from the dead — and give it some woke-friendly image rehabilitation in the process — and Billy, the original Miasma’s “final girl” who’s since retired as a recluse, Norma Desmond style. Kris travels to Billy’s cabin, which happens to be on the original abandoned Miasma lot, to convince her to return for the new movie — only to come away with a very different understanding of what it should be and of who she is.

The meat of the narrative — the dynamic between “two people who match each other’s freak,” as Schoenbrun puts it — actually came last to the director. They’d started mulling the milieu before TV Glow’s 2024 release, following an even longer interest in helming a slasher their own way. Schoenbrun watched every Nightmare on Elm Street in fifth grade. They “lived and breathed” the Scream movies through high school. “That was half my identity — there was almost something festive about renting a slasher and cheering for the most extreme or creative bloody kill that could happen,” Schoenbrun says. As they started to transition, they read up on gender theory, prodding a radical reframing of those gorily cozy childhood faves.

“This image of the trans monster kept coming up, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Frankenstein as a constructed body, and there was this lineage of trans people having really complicated feelings about those movies,” Schoenbrun says. “In one sense, those are the places where they saw representations that felt familiar or comforting in some way to their own experiences — but also, those movies are super fucking transphobic and problematic.”

In Camp Miasma, the franchise monster is called “Little Death,” whose legend comes to consume Kris and spark her sexual reawakening. The role is played by Jack Haven, the breakout trans star of TV Glow. “I want to have a continued collaboration with Jack for the rest of my life,” Schoenbrun says. “And the idea of them embodying the power of both the killer and the hermaphroditic embodiment of the orgasm — if I want to see that shit, someone else is going to want to!”

Camp Miasma stuffs the bloody thrills and jump-scares of a classic slasher into a funnier, weirder and richer deconstruction of their imagery and legacy. There are homages galore, as well as savvy throwback flourishes — from an extensive use of matte backdrops to, good news for TV Glow fans, extensive glimpses of the original (and, OK, fictitious) Camp Miasma — that only enhance the thornier social commentary.

“This movie was very consciously designed to be fun … and to bring in a lot of people to have a discussion about sex and gender and overcoming trauma,” Schoenbrun says. “I don’t know any other movies — certainly any other Hollywood movies — that are having that conversation this way, from this perspective.”

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TV Glow was, for its part, unlike anything else out there, blazing its way to wide critical acclaim and five Spirit Award nominations including best feature. Schoenbrun felt the need to “capitalize” on that movie’s success, eager to push their limits as a filmmaker and shift into a new tonal key. The industry shrugged in response. “Everyone except for Mubi passed on this movie, to be totally blunt,” they say. “Every major studio and distributor passed on the film, and I think it’s because of the limits of what kinds of queer and trans stories are deemed commercial or not commercial.”

Schoenbrun felt determined to cobble together whatever they could to combat that reality, given their post-TV Glow cachet. Coming from the worlds of nonprofit and microbudget indies, they knew “not to trust that the system will allow me freedom.” Rather than risking development hell for a budget befitting the film’s scope, they got scrappy with those who believed in the vision. (Mubi wound up backing the movie alongside Plan B.) 

“When I look around in our ‘post-woke, post-Biden’ era, I don’t see any other trans artists getting budgets, and that’s a fucking shame,” Schoenbrun says. “I shouldn’t be the only one who’s making movies at this level of budget.” They fully expect to prove those finance doubters wrong: “I think this movie will be a hit.”

The character of Kris inevitably represents Schoenbrun to some extent. In crafting her, the director says Einbinder was a close collaborator: “The role is deeply personal to her. … I know that it’s helped her grow and think a lot about herself and her own life. It was kind of an immediate love between us.” Together, they then mined Schoenbrun’s own experiences. In one scene, Kris pitches an updated, enlightened, gay-if-ied version of her Miasma reboot idea on a Zoom filled with executives, which boasts similarities to a personal anecdote Schoenbrun told The New Yorker a few years back (“I’d say it’s loosely based on a number of Zoom calls,” they say with a smirk). Kris’ personal and artistic epiphanies crash against the mandates of the gig.

“I don’t think it’s friendly — I don’t think I’m trying to do The Studio,” Schoenbrun says of Camp Miasma’s take on Hollywood. “The movie represents the experience of somebody trying to find creative autonomy and maybe losing their fucking mind a little bit as they bash their head up against the limits of the highest Zoom rooms of capital.”

Within that dispiriting journey, though, there is liberation — bringing us back to those bloody, vivid sex scenes. “I’m really hoping that they are wrestled with culturally in the way that Blue Velvet’s sex scenes were wrestled with culturally, or the most troubling moments in my previous works have been wrestled with,” Schoenbrun says. “Within those scenes are a lot of complex ideas and feelings that a lot of people share but don’t talk about.”

Einbinder and Anderson’s performances turn most explosive in these intimate encounters. “The reserve of emotional vulnerability that she’s able to tap into at a moment’s notice — I think only the great actors can do this, and I’ve seen it a few times, her ability to fully enter a space of incredibly heightened dramatic performance,” Schoenbrun says of Einbinder. As for Anderson? The director raves: “It almost feels like she’s like Jim Carrey in certain moments. It’s so funny and strange and a little bit grotesque and a little bit sad — so far from our traditional notions of high-fem sexuality, while also still being incredibly sexy and weird.”

Indeed, for a splashy Cannes premiere from an American filmmaker, nothing about Camp Miasma feels traditional. The significance is not lost on Schoenbrun, making their first-ever trip to the festival as a director — after previously attending a decade ago in a very different capacity. “I was working a day job that I hated and in a body that I hated, and that’s literally where I decided to quit my job and figure out how to live a life that felt better,” Schoenbrun says. “I said to myself, ‘I need a better reason to be at Cannes.’” Lucky for us, they found it.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premieres May 13 at the Cannes Film Festival. Stay tuned for more Cannes 2026 first looks and exclusives.

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