After the cult success of last year’s I Saw the TV Glow, filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun has set their next film, and much like their last two films, it looks like they’re planning to flip an entire genre on its head. The film, titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, takes a meta look at slasher franchises and their legacy, from a “psychosexual point of view.”
At a recent screening of I Saw the TV Glow, according to critic Siddhant Adlakha, Schoenbrun described the film as “Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel.” This lines up well with the logline for the film, which follows “a queer filmmaker hired to direct a new installment of a long-running slasher franchise. The director fixates on the prospect of casting the ‘final girl‘ from the original movie, and the two women descend into a frenzy of psychosexual mania.”
The themes are obviously similar to those in Schoenbrun’s last two films, which also includes We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and it seems like they’re set to focus on the aspects of sex that most slashers deal with in some basic way or another, given the classic trope of “dare to have sex and you’re next.” Schoenbrun said to Filmmaker Magazine that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is “all about sex — essentially a movie about learning to enjoy sex after transition. Pre-transition, it wasn’t that I was asexual — I had plenty of desire — but having good sex in the wrong body was impossible. What was available was full dissociation.”
Schoenbrun told The New Yorker that they came up with the title for the film before anything else, and that it will be “funnier and grislier” than their previous films. It’ll also deal with the “gender deviance” of some of horror’s most famous faces, from Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill, and tackle the idea that characters like them (and many others) had “created and codified an idea of transness as monstrous.”
No release date has been set for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but I Saw the TV Glow is available to stream now on Max.
