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\n \u201cI love television. I love American movies. And I also want to destroy them,\u201d says Jane Schoenbrun, director of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which hits theaters on August 7.
\n Photo: Collier Schorr for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
Battered cars with numbers sprayed on their sides are whipping around the dirt track of the Lebanon Valley Speedway, loose fenders flopping like overgrown bangs in the swirling dust. The carcass of a school bus, painted blue and perched on its end to serve as a temporary monolith, touts the name of the night\u2019s event: Eve of Destruction, an annual demolition derby in bucolic Hudson Valley, New York. Everything on the premises radiates with July heat, from the bleachers surrounding the course to the DIY rig near the ticketbooth inveigling passersby to pull a string that sends a gout of fire into the air. The setting is doing all it can to evoke mayhem, but the vehicles seem focused on actual racing rather than engineered collisions, and there\u2019s been frustratingly little contact. Beside me in the rickety wooden seating, filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is also chafing at the lack of chaos, their gentle blue eyes fixed ahead.\u00a0They\u2019re dressed in an airy tank top and skirt, topped off with a halo of curly hair and a tattoo on their upper arm of the phrase \u201cMake it Real.\u201d\u00a0\u201cMORE DESTRUCTION!\u201d they call to the indifferent skies.<\/p>\n
A 7,000-seat motor speedway is about as far removed as you can get from the last setting where I saw the 39-year-old Schoenbrun. Two months ago, we were both in the south of France, where Schoenbrun\u2019s new movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma<\/a>, opened the Cannes Film Festival\u2019s Un Certain Regard sidebar. Following the premiere, the filmmaker, dressed in a tuxedo jacket and a Comme des Gar\u00e7ons balloon skirt, smiled as a packed theater of cinephiles and celebrities took to their feet and applauded for what stopwatch-obsessed trades<\/a> timed to be nine minutes. Schoenbrun was flanked by Camp Miasma\u2019s stars, Hacks breakout Hannah Einbinder and X-Files icon Gillian Anderson, and would wake the next morning to reviews that praised their mix of \u201corgasms and geysers of blood<\/a>\u201d and declared, \u201cThere is absolutely no one else, alive or dead, who could have made a feature that looks and feels like this one<\/a>.\u201d Camp Miasma, which is getting released by Mubi this week, left the festival with the Queer Palm award and the glow rapturous festival receptions afford.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, one doesn\u2019t dare dream to have those kinds of experiences in this industry because it is so fickle,\u201d Anderson recalls. \u201cWhen it happens, it almost feels too good to be true.\u201d<\/p>\n Schoenbrun\u2019s first two narrative features, 2021\u2019s We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair and 2024\u2019s I Saw the TV Glow, prompted Paul Schrader to describe them as<\/a> \u201chands down the most original voice in film in the last decade.\u201d Martin Scorsese<\/a> cited TV Glow as one of the only new titles that managed to tear him away from his usual routine of repertory rewatching. That second movie \u2014 which was produced by Emma Stone and vaulted into cult status the moment A24 released it \u2014 earned accolades for its genre-defying plot, an aura of \u201990s-inspired nostalgia that manages to feel as confining as it does lush, and its gutting emotional terrain. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, about a young director who develops an intense connection to the reclusive lead of the slasher franchise she\u2019s been hired to reboot, is poised to become even more of a cultural phenomenon. It\u2019s another impossible mash-up of a sort that feels unique to Schoenbrun: part meditation on intimacy, part riff on horror tropes, and part psychosexual bonding session bringing together a Gen-X icon and one of the faces of Gen-Z comedy to explore what turns us on, both onscreen and in bed.<\/p>\n Photo: Collier Schorr for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n It wouldn\u2019t be overstating things to describe Schoenbrun as the most prominent trans filmmaker working right now. Though you can quibble over this framing \u2014 the Wachowskis have done work on a larger scale, but neither sister has directed since 2021 \u2014 it\u2019s a designation that says as much about the industry as it does about Schoenbrun\u2019s indisputable rise. They say they sometimes feel like the \u201conly trans person in America getting money from film financiers to make work,\u201d and even then, they had to fight for Camp Miasma. A24 passed on the new movie, and there was a period where Schoenbrun was seriously considering what it would mean to make a scaled-back version on their own. Mubi ultimately agreed to finance it, but Schoenbrun still could only eke out a $10 million budget, equal to what they worked with on I Saw the TV Glow, to make a more expansive, more star-studded, and, in many ways, more gleeful film. In contrast to their last two projects, which channeled feelings of alienation and dysphoria, <\/strong>Camp Miasma is as jubilant and funny as it is blood-splattered, vibrating with a wild, assured energy that is equally present in a sequence of mass slaughter set to the Counting Crows and in a tender sex scene. Schoenbrun was left wondering, Is trans trauma considered more commercially viable to studio executives than liberation?<\/p>\n At around the same time they were raising funds for Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun was shopping an original TV show called Public Access Afterworld, a decade-spanning epic about cults, content moderation, and human sacrifice. They say they came tantalizingly close to getting the go-ahead at HBO. Other places turned it down for \u201cskewing too young,\u201d which Schoenbrun interpreted as a euphemism for featuring too much \u201cfag shit.\u201d Rather than abandon the series, they turned it into their debut novel, the first of a planned trilogy, due in October from Hogarth Books. They\u2019ve gotten better at dealing with the frustrating rhythms of the industry \u2014 to not give their heart to a potential project that might never come to fruition, and to keep going when things do fall apart \u2014 though the hardest lesson has been that sometimes they need to be the one to walk away when things don\u2019t feel right.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m working in these mediums that are clearly indebted to commercial power structures,\u201d Schoenbrun says. \u201cAnd the more I do it, the more I\u2019m like, That\u2019s the core tension. I love television. I love American movies. And I also want to destroy them. I see them as prisons as much as they\u2019re spaces of emancipation.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Schoenbrun doesn\u2019t live in Los Angeles, the center of commercial power structures in Hollywood. They split their time between Brooklyn and Chatham, a small New York town about 20 minutes away from the speedway. Back in that exhaust-perfumed patch of Columbia County, Schoenbrun and <\/strong>I decide to take a break from the vehicular non-action and check out the various stalls roosting in the shadow of the flag stand. We wander past toddlers in protective headphones, elderly couples with mobility aids, roaming clusters of teenage girls in light-up cowboys hats, and heavily tattooed semi-goths. Schoenbrun points out a man wearing a shirt that says, mystifyingly, \u201cThe Best Leftovers Are MILF.\u201d They opt for a meatball grinder, while I go for a pair of slightly-paler-than-standard hot dogs, three bread-swaddled beige offerings that cost a blessed total of $11 and have the powerfully nostalgic taste profile of selections from a school cafeteria. (The next day, Schoenbrun will text me a picture of the vegetables they felt compelled to eat for lunch as recompense.)<\/p>\n Schoenbrun is not a regular attendee of automotive novelty nights. Some Chatham friends recommended the derby as an amusing local attraction, so here we are. But Schoenbrun is familiar with the more general phenomenon of wreckage and, more acutely, its aftermath. Over the past seven years, they\u2019ve blown up their old life and deliberately rebuilt it into something healthier, happier, and new. It started at the age of 32, when they came out as trans, a journey that is inextricably entwined with their coming to terms with the fact they wanted to be a filmmaker. Both are truths they\u2019d been skirting for years, aware that acknowledging either would mean upending their life. As Schoenbrun brings up more than once, simply being trans in a world that acts increasingly hostile to your existence shortens your life expectancy. It can also lead to familial estrangement, which was the case for Schoenbrun, though over the last year, they have started talking to their parents again.<\/p>\n Pursuing a life as a filmmaker brought its own challenges \u2014 chiefly exposing themself, creatively and financially, in a way Schoenbrun never had before. While they majored in film at Boston University and PA\u2019d on shorts by fellow undergrads Benny and Josh Safdie, they parlayed their degree into a career with steadier paychecks, working at nonprofits and crowdfunding platforms. Schoenbrun had dabbled in creating things themself, like The Eyeslicer, an episodic variety show they started producing in 2017 with Vanessa McDonnell, and 2018\u2019s A Self-Induced Hallucination, assembled entirely out of YouTube videos about the online bogeyman Slender Man. But it wasn\u2019t until 2021 that they released their first narrative feature, We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair, which premiered at Sundance to buzz and bewilderment. Independently financed for $100,000 and costing about that much to finish and release, the film recouped its investment as soon as Utopia and HBO Max picked up the theatrical and streaming rights, respectively. From there, Emma Stone and her husband, Dave McCary, attached themselves as producers to Schoenbrun\u2019s next planned movie. By October 2021, A24 had boarded the project.<\/p>\n This period was one in which Schoebrun became, as they put it, \u201can expert at identifying a thing that I knew I wanted that felt completely terrifying to go after and forcing myself to suffer through getting comfortable having that thing become reality.\u201d Neither World\u2019s Fair nor TV Glow are autobiographical in a conventional sense \u2014 instead, Schoenbrun describes them as the cinematic equivalent of \u201cwails.\u201d They started writing World\u2019s Fair, about an isolated teenage girl (played by first-timer Anna Cobb) trying to effect a state of change in herself through an internet challenge, before coming out as trans, something only half the crew who worked on the film was aware of during production. I Saw the TV Glow \u2014 about suburban teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Jack Haven), who channel their feelings of disconnection into an obsession with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer\u2013esque television show called The Pink Opaque and who come to believe the only way to escape from their stifling existence and connect to their true selves is to submit to being buried alive \u2014 came out of the turbulent period in the fall of 2020 when Schoenbrun was just a few months into HRT.<\/p>\n In this way, summarizing Schoenbrun\u2019s films can be tricky. Describing the elliptical plots only gets at a fraction of what unfolds onscreen, as Schoenbrun attempts to capture emotions and moods that are spongier, stranger, and less easy to place. They draw so directly from their own experiences growing up and with transition that their work can, ironically, read as oblique in its refusal to assume viewers need a more blunt explanation of the parallels it draws. \u201cThey\u2019re not straightforward. They\u2019re not lectures that I can give,\u201d Schoenbrun says of their movies. \u201cIt\u2019s like the narrative form becomes a means through which to communicate with myself or an audience as articulately as possible about this hard to put into language thing.\u201d<\/p>\n What helps make the films more inviting are the myriad reference points, with pop-culture ephemera serving as a way into unflinching personal territory. This combination has led to a remarkable number of impassioned Letterboxd testimonials, even if TV Glow only ended up netting $5 million at the box office. \u201cI read all the comments about how Jane changed my life,\u201d says Arianna Bocco, the head of global distribution at Mubi. \u201cIt\u2019s rare to find a filmmaker who can speak to the audience in such a direct way.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Scenes from Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. From left: <\/strong>Photo: A24\/Everett CollectionPhoto: Utopia\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n \n Scenes from Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. From top: <\/strong>Photo: A24\/Everett CollectionPhoto: Utopia\/Everett … more It\u2019s a sign of the stability Schoenbrun has spent the last few years fighting for that their new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is much more playful and sultry than their previous movies. Its main character is a 29-year-old queer director named Kris (Einbinder) who, after breaking out at Sundance with a remake of Psycho told from the perspective of the shower curtain, gets hired to reboot and wokewash a dormant slasher franchise called Camp Miasma. Kris is a consummate overthinker in her work and in her personal life, and she decides the only way to make the project work is to track down Billy Presley (Anderson), the reclusive, long-retired actor who played the final girl in the original. But even this synopsis doesn\u2019t begin to get at what an ecstatic, gory experience the film actually is, a surreal swirl of painted matte backdrops and syrupy southern accents that\u2019s all about being present, both in your own body while having sex and in your emotional reactions to media, even when it\u2019s hokey or casually hateful.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n While neither of Camp Miasma\u2019s primary characters is a teenager, Schoenbrun still thinks of it as another teenage movie, one that reflects the compressed second adolescence they found themselves speedrunning post-transition in their 30s. Like Kris, who gets so in her own head whenever she\u2019s in bed with someone that a tireless Billy has to coach her into not disassociating, Schoenbrun is a person for whom sex had to be relearned. For years, the only person they had been with was their wife, Melissa Ader, a workers\u2019 rights lawyer, with whom they shared their first kiss and to whom they\u2019re still married. The two started dating at the age of 18, over half a lifetime ago, when they were in high school in Westchester. (Like the characters in I Saw the TV Glow and the two teenagers at the beginning of Public Access Afterworld, the pair spent a lot of their formative years watching television together in a suburban basement.) It wasn\u2019t as though Schoenbrun was missing a sexual drive, but that aspect of themself was colored by everything they were repressing and weren\u2019t ready to acknowledge about their own gender identity.<\/p>\n \u201cI literally remember being like, \u2018Oh, this must be like, Close your eyes and think of England,\u2019\u201d they laugh. \u201cI would just avoid sex and know it was this thing that I was supposed to be having and pretend that I had a normal relationship to it.\u201d Schoenbrun and Ader had talked about nonmonogamy in a theoretical sense, but it wasn\u2019t until 2022, after Schoenbrun transitioned, that the two actually decided to shift their relationship to a polyamorous structure. \u201cSo much of my conception of intimacy and family and friends changed after coming out,\u201d Schoenbrun explains, \u201cwhere I needed interdependence in a way that I didn\u2019t before because the structures of privilege had changed.\u201d They experienced casual sex as a transfemme lesbian and embarked on their first big post-transition romance. They learned what it was like to feel guilty over being out with someone new and what it was like to sit at home while the people they were involved with enjoyed the company of others.<\/p>\n Schoenbrun now has three primary partners, including Ader, and feels comfortably settled in those relationships. Ader, meanwhile, experienced her own reset. \u201cFor the first few years of Jane\u2019s transition, my primary goal was to support them. I wasn\u2019t thinking very much about myself,\u201d she tells me over the phone. \u201cThen, two years after they came out, I came out as a lesbian and I started focusing on myself and what I wanted out of my life. My life today does not look like what I thought it would look like, in a quite beautiful way.\u201d<\/p>\n Their arrangement is another example of Schoenbrun getting used to doing the scary thing, a continuing process that informs what Kris goes through onscreen in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Candy is a significant visual theme in the movie, from the trays of sweets positioned invitingly around Billy\u2019s house to the gas-station gummy selection that prompts extreme opinions from Kris. Sugar may be shorthand for decadence, but Schoenbrun also jokingly describes it as a form of aftercare for themself when they stepped back into the dating world. \u201cYou buy some junk food beforehand and then you know you\u2019ve got junk food waiting for you, even if the sex is bad and shitty and ends before it starts.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Jane Schoenbrun on the set of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Schoenbrun characterizes Chatham as a mix of the oldest Democrats you\u2019ll ever meet living alongside stretches of Trump supporters, all of it built on a historical legacy of Ann Lee\u2013inspired land sharing (the Shaker Museum, set to open in the town in two years, gets a few shout-outs from the demolition-derby announcer) and shaken up by a growing influx of newer arrivals, many from the city. Among them are a few of the friends who told Schoenbrun about the Eve of Destruction in the first place, some of whom \u2014 one wearing a sick Padm\u00e9 Amidala tee, the other hurrying off to assist a friend who\u2019ll be doing some sort of snake-handling act later \u2014 we run into over the course of the night.<\/p>\n Schoenbrun had previously spent time in the Hudson Valley, which functions as a bucolic escape for plenty of New Yorkers who aren\u2019t in a Hamptons income bracket. But in April 2023, when Schoenbrun was in the thick of what they consider the late stages of early transition and after it had become clear Public Access Afterworld would have to emerge into the world as a book, they left Brooklyn with the intention to stay out longer and get some writing done. They knew all of two people in the region, neither very well. One was Emily Sprague from the band Florist, who contributed a song to the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack, and the other was Grace Brannigan, who they \u201cknew just via being a trans girl on Twitter.\u201d Brannigan, a chef who runs a coffee shop in Catskill called 27 Cafe, invited Schoenbrun over to the home they shared with three trans people on a random weeknight to partake in a duck they were roasting. When Schoenbrun walked into the house, they were greeted by the sight of someone smoking weed while watching Michael Haneke\u2019s Cach\u00e9, which they paused \u2014 right before an abrupt scene of startling violence \u2014 to say \u201chello.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThen they unpaused it, and it immediately happened,\u201d Schoenbrun remembers. \u201cI was like, Oh, I have a crush on this way of living.\u201d They spent most of the summer in the area, falling in love with the community they found and a vibe they describe as \u201cquietly utopian.\u201d They still have a place in Brooklyn that they share with Ader, who they\u2019ve lived with since 2012. (The couple just moved to a new apartment in Park Slope where they\u2019re each able to have their own bedroom, something they\u2019d never experienced in their adult lives.) But in Chatham, for $600 a month, Schoenbrun splits an apartment with their best friend, a farmer, with whom they\u2019ll cook dinner, watch TV, and walk down to the creek. They\u2019ll see movies \u2014 and sometimes program them \u2014 at the Community Theater in Catskill, a restored 100-year-old cinema that runs as a nonprofit and last year added a video store to its offerings. (Schoenbrun may split their time between the city and a small town, but they\u2019re a child of the suburbs, having grown up on VHS rentals and Buffy message boards.) They go to barbecues and swim and allow the city to feel like a place they visit rather than live in. Ader, who has her own life in the city, comes up every few weeks, but the space is very much Schoenbrun\u2019s.<\/p>\n More than anything, Schoenbrun appreciates that they\u2019ve found a place outside of the endless chase that is the entertainment industry \u2014 where their value isn\u2019t predicated on success and where they are around people who love art but aren\u2019t focused on monetizing it. After We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair became a modestly buzzy success upon its 2022 release by Utopia, Schoenbrun was sent all sorts of unproduced scripts they had no interest in directing, including one for a reboot of Leprechaun. The fact someone thought they could leverage a trans filmmaker to make a revival of that franchise acceptable was one of the inspirations behind Kris\u2019s encounter with zombie IP in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The other was the time Schoenbrun found themselves, on the basis of a dream they had, pitching a vore-adjacent concept to a bewildered network executive who was trying to put together a TV take on Todd Haynes\u2019s Safe.<\/p>\n But even as they weather experiences of having their identity commodified and potentially tokenized by the industry, they\u2019ve extended hands to peers on its edges. Among them is fellow Trans New Weird<\/a> filmmaker Avalon Fast, who pitched Schoenbrun on what could loosely be described as a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Camp Miasma. The 26-year-old recently made their own horror-ish <\/strong>coming-of-age film called Camp<\/a> for a few thousand dollars, and this experience marked their first time on a bigger shoot. While Fast was familiar with, as they put it, the \u201cevil that has to be interacted with to make a movie of that scale,\u201d it freaked them out a little. They left Camp Miasma with a renewed appreciation for the freedom of making movies for nothing with their friends. \u201cSeeing it with Jane, it was inspiring because it\u2019s like, You know how to fight that and get what you want,\u201d Fast explains. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I have the same kind of fight in me.\u201d<\/p>\n With Camp Miasma\u2019s theatrical release imminent, Schoenbrun is about to face down the ultimate collision of art and commerce in the form of the box office. They\u2019ve tried to maintain a healthy relationship with this part of the process, so much of which is out of their control, but they\u2019re aware of how much ticket sales could dictate their capacity to keep working: \u201cIt would be sick to make a bunch of money so they let me do that again.\u201d Then, if the momentum is right, there could be awards campaigning. \u201cI do subscribe to that Bu\u00f1uel quote of \u2018Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than to receive an Oscar.\u2019 At the same time, obviously, I\u2019m crossing my fingers for noms because that is the blank check.\u201d<\/p>\n Schoenbrun\u2019s next project is neither a film nor an original project, though it is another foray into the unknown: a Netflix-series adaptation of Black Hole, Charles Burns\u2019s comic books about a group of teenagers infected with an STD that causes strange physical mutations. They are going to write the whole season themselves and have finished two episodes already, and while so far, there\u2019s no reason to believe it\u2019s going to require sizable battles, it is new territory and a new way of working.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/926e776b416cfd9528ba13b873abf6cb26-VULTURE-JANE-4X5-final.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: MUBI\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/e9e9ff7b728ab4283e2cd9e481571b64d3-isawthetvglow.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Scenes from Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. From top: <\/strong>Photo: A24\/Everett CollectionPhoto: Utopia\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/c2edf8603315e86ff44a8e9c4127b5e0f7-campmiasma-bts2.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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