Jane Schoenbrun on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s third narrative feature, opens in theaters tomorrow. Dizzyingly meta-textual and deliciously, well, campy, the film stars Hannah Einbinder as an emerging queer filmmaker tasked with directing a reboot of a fictional ’80s slasher franchise titled Camp Miasma. She decides to visit the final girl of the original movie who is now an eccentric middle-aged recluse, played by Gillian Anderson, who’s living on the campgrounds where the first movie was shot. What unfolds is, in the words of our critic Nathan Lee, a “gore-soaked, titty-bouncing, sexploitation fever dream girded by real conceptual brio.” Meditations on the perverse riddles of desire as well as the queer subtexts of many slasher films and the kind of strange identification they invite from the spectator are rendered with perfectly pitched horror theatrics and laugh-out-loud humor.  Film Comment Editor Devika Girish spoke with Schoenbrun about this very rich text, trying to unpack the film’s layers—but not too hard, because if there’s one thing you can take away from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, it’s that analysis is a boner-killer and mystery is hot.Subscribe to Film Comment today for full access to new quarterly digital issues as well as our comprehensive archive of every Film Comment issue published since 1962.