Jane Schoenbrun, one of the era’s most distinctive film-makers, first came to the Cannes film festival a little over a decade ago. They were then in an industry job they didn’t much enjoy. “The next year I came back and I was so depressed. I decided to quit my job,” Schoenbrun later explained. “If I’m depressed at Cannes, there’s something that needs to change. I know I want to be here but I need a better reason to be here.”
If real life were a cheesy film, the image would dissolve from a disappointed Schoenbrun to hysterical acclaim in the Debussy Theatre and the subtitle “10 years later”. You read a lot of nonsense about standing ovations at Cannes, but the response, at this year’s event in May, to Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma really was something special. The director, with co-stars Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder, huddled in the middle of a giant human doughnut as massed bellows rocked the architecture.
Is this the response one would expect to a twisty, postmodern meditation on psychic echoes of the 1980s slasher movie in contemporary culture? Maybe so if you are Jane Schoenbrun. The director, who is transfeminine and nonbinary, has already established a significant following with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. “There was one film I liked a great deal I saw two weeks ago called I Saw the TV Glow,” Martin Scorsese said in 2024. “It really was emotionally and psychologically powerful and very moving.” Paul Schrader, that director’s great collaborator, said Schoenbrun “had hands down the most original voice in film in the last decade”.
Anyway, the day after the premiere, Schoenbrun, relaxed on an upper floor of the JW Mariott hotel, a few hundred metres along the Croisette, appears relieved that the audience understood where the picture was coming from. The film-maker remembers getting a lot of notes during the production process.
“I actually like that – as long as it’s coming from the right place,” they say. “I try to do that to myself. I really do. I interrogate. It’s very painful. Especially with movies like this that are as pretentious as f**k. I am getting so ‘in my head’ about it. Then you actually make it and you watch it with people, and you’re like: ‘Wait? Are you feeling things though?’ You always have to be ready to question very deeply the choices you’ve really invested in.”
Jane Schoenbrun. Photograph: Jamie McCarthy/Getty
Pretentious as f**k? Well, maybe. But, like their previous two investigations into horror mythos, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma really is a heck of a lot of fun (that title alone!). Einbinder, best known from the TV show Hacks, plays Kris, a young queer film-maker hired to make a belated reboot of a 1980s teen slasher franchise called Camp Miasma. Anderson is majestic as Billy Presley, a retired “final girl” from the series whom Kris considers luring back before the camera. We know we are headed for prime oddness when we discover that Billy is living on the location of the original film. There is a lot of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard in the character. There is a bit of Schoenbrun in Kris – both are outré experimental filmmakers elevated into the biggish leagues after cult success. Some of the film’s funniest moments feature conference calls with baffled studio types.
“I’ve now made two movies for real Hollywood money,” Schoenbrun says. “Not much as far as ‘Hollywood money’ goes. But still more money than I’ve got. I think this movie’s budget was somewhere in the $8 million or $9 million range. You are going to have to get on some Zoom calls with some men to get money. In so many ways, this is a movie about joy, and this is a movie about queer liberation through art making. The movie would have been a lie if dealing with commerce to get the movie made wasn’t in the text.”
As you may have gathered, Schoenbrun is a smart cookie. They have all the highbrow critical terms in their arsenal. But there is nothing remotely pompous about the film-maker. One scene in which, as the two leads are watching a video, Kris frowns at a supposedly inappropriate sequence is having a good-natured laugh at prescriptive progressives.
“Obviously I’m taking the piss out of myself a little bit with ‘this part’s transphobic’. Shut up!” they say, laughing. “TV Glow was such a personal film that came out of this really visceral moment in my life. I think that’s exactly why it resonated so hard with other people. But one thing that I’ve been really pleased with in sharing this film with people, and actually with a lot of those Hollywood types, is they seem almost shocked when they first watch it that it’s funny and self-aware.”
This is true. Nobody is likely to find Camp Miasma hard work. Schoenbrun makes comparison with Jordan Peele’s Nope from 2022.
“I think there’s this assumption that if it’s a trans film you’re going to have to eat your vegetables now,” they say, laughing. “‘The gays say this is important, so we’ve got to watch it and try to get what it’s about.’ There is a technique of trying to win you over a little bit before I try to rock your world a little bit. I remember seeing Nope in theatres and really feeling: here is a movie about threading the needle. There is a movie about looking the thing in the eye.”
Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Born to a Jewish family in the New York borough of Queens, Schoenbrun was raised some miles to the north of the city in Westchester County. Their obsession with horror in early life – Buffy was a big favourite – showed through in the brilliant I Saw the TV Glow, which finds two oddballs uniting over love for a spooky TV show. Schoenbrun was hugely into fan fiction and bulletin boards – key obsessions of a millennial childhood. After taking a degree in film at Boston University, they found work as a production assistant and wrote articles for Filmmaker magazine.
The creation of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a 2021 psychological horror obliquely on gender themes, looks to have been a formative experience in more ways than one. A 2024 profile in the New Yorker explained how, in preparation for the film, Schoenbrun “turned to psilocybin” (the hallucinogenic agent in magic mushrooms). “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to investigate on this trip why I am so ashamed,’” they told the magazine. “I still thought I was a boy.”
Schoenbrun went on to take a singular route to what just about counts as worldwide renown. Neither Worlds Fair nor TV Glow made a fortune, but both landed on all the best-of-the-year lists that matter (the latter came in at number six on The Irish Times’ favourites for 2024). There was, before Camp Miasma opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, a carnival atmosphere in the auditorium. The title itself was greeted with cheers.
It helped that Gillian Anderson was in the building. You hardly need to be told, given Schoenbrun’s teenage obsessions, that they were a great fan of The X-Files.
“I was so deeply inspired by Gillian,” they say. “I wrote X-Files fan fiction as a kid, and my most prized possession was my X-Files novelisation collection. I was a nerd. I was thinking mostly about The X-Files for a few of those formative years. So, there was obviously something emotional and meta in the casting, right? When I first met Gillian, it was like: ‘Oh my God, I already know you. This is so weird. Did you raise me a little bit?’ And, for so many people, she’s played that role. For so many people, she is this queer awakening, and I hope you feel like catch a whiff of that in the movie.”
There is a remarkable amount to process in Camp Miasma. The film is about US’s long romance with violence. It is groaning with addictions to high trash – not just horror films, but also the bright colours of candy bars. And there is a great deal about the complications of sexual longing.
Hannah Einbinder in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
“There are certainly cinematic references to sex or academic references to sex that I was bringing to the table,” Schoenbrun says. “But primarily it was my own relationship to sex that I was trying to be really honest about. Until I was 32, I had kissed and had sex with exactly one person. Sex was something that I avoided. It was traumatic. It was like: oh, I know that that’s a part of life; I guess I’ve got to deal with that somehow. Then, after transition, as I started to ‘become’, it was both terrifying and very joyful and meaningful. I think an essential part of becoming a full person in the world is to learn how to have a healthier relationship to sex. I don’t care if it is good or bad. I just want to be here, experiencing it.”
Knocking on the door of 40, Schoenbrun has sympathy for the next generation.
“We talk a lot about like this generational divide,” they say. “It’s like Gen Z isn’t having sex. ‘What’s that about?’ I think it’s obvious what it’s about. Not only is it about how much lonelier a world we’re all living in, but it’s also about how much uglier a world we’re living in. Just take one visit to the homepage of Pornhub to understand that ugliness.”
Schoenbrun has taken on a great sadness.
“It’s no wonder that these folks would want to avoid sex.”
Who would be young in 2026?
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in cinemas from August 21st