With Teenage Sex and Death, Jane Schoenbrun Made a New Camp Classic

Warning: spoilers ahead for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Jane Schoenbrun knows that the slasher genre has always been about "getting together and enjoying slutty co-eds getting chopped up by the guy with the phallus who might have some gender shit going on." But when it came to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in theaters now after premiering at Cannes, their own ode to the horror subgenre, the director wanted to probe a little deeper. "At the absolute center is this confusion between [sex and violence]," they tell W. "But it can also feel like just good fun."

After breaking out with the one-two punch of 2021’s We're All Going to the World's Fair and 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun has returned with their most violent, most overtly sexual, and, yes, most fun film to date. A reality-bending psychodrama, Camp Miasma follows the prickly, transformative relationship between Hannah Einbinder’s Kris, a sexually repressed, hyperwoke film director tasked with rebooting the fictional Camp Miasma horror franchise, and Gillian Anderson’s Billy Presley, the original film's final girl. As Kris tries to convince Billy to come out of retirement, the two women help each other confront past traumas before embarking on a passionate love affair that reframes how they think about themselves, their bodies, and the very nature of desire.

Like all of Schoenbrun's films, Camp Miasma is at least partially an exploration of gender trauma—but where their previous releases attempted to capture the feeling of dysphoria itself, this one wrestles with how that dysphoria spills over into one's ability to experience sexual pleasure. That Schoenbrun's film doubles as a study of how their queer perspective has been both lauded and exploited is impressive. That it doesn't shirk classic slasher thrills—or steamy sapphic sex scenes—makes it an instant classic.

All of your films have explored society's relationship with screens. Why is that a subject you keep returning to?

From the beginning, there has been this intuitive understanding of write what you know—and before transitioning, all I did was stare at screens. It doesn't feel terribly sustainable to me. It feels like a sickness more and more. But it's such a beautiful and surreal thing to go into a dark room and be witness to these glowing images. It's like science fiction. It can be a portal you travel through that allows you to understand something about identity that isn't apparent in these more daylight spaces.

Horror has always toyed with the ‘sex = violence’ trope—and per its title, Camp Miasma is clearly playing with that lineage. One of the film's biggest reveals concerns Gillian’s character admitting that an event we assumed was sex was actually traumatic violence. What did you want to say about that connection?

The film came from this post-transition confronting of an oblique form of sexual trauma that I experienced in those years before transition, which was knowing that there was something wrong but [still] performing yourself in the wrong way because that's what's expected of you. I didn't want to be having sex, because I knew there was something hidden underneath it that proved that I was fucked up and wrong. And that's the trauma Kris is experiencing in the movie.

But the trauma that Gillian's character is experiencing in the movie is different—and not being born as a cis woman, I think I dodged a fucking bullet [being able to avoid it]. It's hyper-common to be taught as a young woman that not only is sex not something that has much to do with your own pleasure, but that it's expected of you and that it's connected to something being taken from you. We don't call it "sexual assault" as much as we should. But, yes, [Gillian's] character was sexually assaulted and [now] needs to figure out how to marry pleasure and violence, because that's the origin story of sexuality for her—and for many, many other women.

Your leads, Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, were both so good at bringing these characters to life. What was it like working with them?

I think of this as a movie about two weirdos matching each other's freak. If there is any tension in the movie, it's just them playing these weird little games with each other as they get deeper into this shared fantasy world. For any of that to work, it needs to be a living thing, where you, [the viewer], are feeling like the third party falling in love.

They're both incredibly physical performers. With Gillian, it was when she's first meeting Kris, and she's patting the fried chicken with her hands. I remember zooming in on that with my eyes and being like, "There it is. That's all I need to know about this character." And for Hannah, it's such a committed, funny performance. But it goes to some really devastating places. Her ability to completely change from the beginning to the end of the movie is almost like an invisible trick.

Kris identifies the Camp Miasma franchise as being transphobic, and yet admits that it's still quite important to her. Did you want to open up a conversation about how we’re all susceptible to enjoying things we might know are offensive?

For trans people who are interested in the idea of a ‘trans film image,’ it's the only option. There are stray examples throughout film history of trans people being presented in ways that don't feel leering and horrible, but also, kind of not. Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner write about this in their book Corpses, Fools and Monsters, which is a history of the trans image in film. I think the title says it all.

I didn't watch The Silence of the Lambs and think, "Look! It's me! That's what I want to do. I want the skin suit, and I want to talk back and do that little dance." But it does leave an imprint. If you're a really repressed trans girl like I was, you can look at that and be like, "Ooh, this is the forbidden thing." There is some layer of it that's exciting, to see that your desire can be acknowledged in some way and put on a screen. But you can also be horrified because it's like, "I'm being told that that desire is grotesque and [should be] punished." I'm interested in thinking about what all of that means. But I also just think ‘woke-scold’ is a tired idea. I don't think anyone over the age of 18 is too emotionally invested anymore.

The movie is called "Teenage Sex." What are your thoughts about the younger generation's changing attitudes towards sex and intimacy?

I know Gregg Araki's film I Want Your Sex is also about this, and I do think we live in a horrific sexual culture. The Pornhub homepage is a disturbing sewer of violent straight male fantasy. Culturally, anyone with a fucking soul is going to have a complicated relationship to sex in 2026 America. [So their uneasiness around sex] makes perfect sense to me, but that doesn't mean the solution is not having sex. Speaking as someone who was not having good, regular sex for a long time and is now having good, regular sex, [I can say that] it is a lot healthier. It's a part of life that, even if scary, is worth exploring—and the movie is trying to talk about that.