Jane Schoenbrun’s previous features, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, established their unique artistic style and fondness for narratives that keep the viewer guessing. Their next film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, looks to be similarly unconventional—though it will also draw on one of horror’s most famously trope-laden subgenres, the slasher film.
Subverting the expected is definitely in Schoenbrun’s playbook, but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma sounds like a movie that will also be very aware of its roots. Not only does it follow an up-and-coming filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder) hired to revitalize a long-running slasher series about a murder-plagued summer camp, it will also explore what it’s like to be the veteran “Final Girl” of such a series. Gillian Anderson’s character has become so intertwined with the movies she once starred in that she now lives in one of its old sets.
In a new interview with Empire, Schoenbrun revealed they held a special screening of Crystal Lake Memories—a seven-hour documentary that charts a path through all the Friday the 13th films, featuring behind-the-scenes tales from various cast and crew members over the years—to get everyone on the same page.
“To me it’s better than Best in Show in [that] it’s a perfect mockumentary, except it’s real,” Schoenbrun explained.
Of course, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will spiral far beyond anything seen at Camp Crystal Lake; as the film’s official synopsis promises, the two women at its center will “fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.”
Schoenbrun told Empire it’s “the first film that represents all of me,” and it sounds like it will more overtly explore the queer and trans themes the filmmaker introduced in their earlier works, especially I Saw the TV Glow. It’s something they see as tied into the traditions of horror history.
“Norman Bates dressed up in his mother’s clothes, or Buffalo Bill in his skin suit, tucking his penis back and doing his freaky dance—even in the movies where there isn’t an explicit transsexual menace, you still get the impression that a Michael Myers or a Leatherface is dealing with all kinds of fucked-up Freudian shit that has something to do with sex and gender deviance,” Schoenbrun said.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma hits theaters August 7, which means there’s still ample time for you to screen Crystal Lake Memories before it opens.
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