Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun leaves behind the isolating angst of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow for a lighter, humorous take on the slasher with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
While Schoenbrun’s latest continues to explore identity, it’s now through a playful lens.
The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. When Kris seeks out the slasher’s original final girl, Billy (Gillian Anderson), she finds art imitating life as the pair are thrust into a blood-soaked delirium of fear and desire.
Schoebrun paves Kris’s path toward sexual liberation with camp horror and humor, and no shortage of junk food. The tonal departure from previous works wasn’t just meant to be in service of this particular story, but a conscious choice on the filmmaker’s part to evolve.
“I want every film that I make to feel more like this full spectrum of who I am,” Schoenbrun tells Bloody Disgusting. “And I want every film to expand what I’m allowed to do as an artist and filmmaker. I was really conscious after TV Glow of, if I make another super angsty, teen angst kind of movie, I’m going to get pigeonholed as that person. I don’t think I am that person. It’s not that I don’t love that movie and that tone, but there’s a goofiness that has always been a huge part of who I am that, because of the first two films, where they came from and the time in my life that they came out, I don’t think that they captured the stoner goofball version of me in the way that I want to be seen.
“So I was really quickly like, ‘We need a giant geyser of blood in the first scene, and the thing needs to be playful and joyful and completely unexpected tonally in this way.‘“
That giant geyser, in the context of the film, comes courtesy of Camp Miasma‘s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven).
While Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Kris’s story, Little Death quickly steals scenes for their unceremonious yet brutal dispatching, culminating in a showstopping centerpiece slaughter sequence. Schoenbrun unleashes a massacre worthy of the ’80s slashers they’re homaging, complete with inspired needle drop and nonstop practical gore, all handled in a continuous take with a 60-pound camera rig strapped to Haven to capture the madness up close.’
It was easily the most challenging sequence in the entire film.
How did Schoenbrun and crew pull this off? “A lot of work. A lot of work. I even wrote in the script, ‘And now it’s time for the most complicated part of the movie.‘ But it was the part that everyone was most excited to work on because when you have a team that really is there because they love the sandbox-style play of making make-believe real, the more technically ambitious or seemingly impossible, the more excited everyone is to figure it out.
“And I’ve never done anything half as ambitious in terms of the interdepartmental meetings and timing it to the song, but also figuring out all the hidden cuts and all of the costume changes and how VFX was going to work with practical. It was like choreographing an entire play within the movie, except there are cameras and actors and all of this technical information. It was just hundreds and hundreds of hours of work and a team that was very, very dedicated to making something special. I think it’s a rule of magic that often the trick is just working really, really hard.“
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases in select theaters today, August 7, before expanding wider on August 14.
