Six Slasher Films That Gave Director Jane Schoenbrun's Meta-Horror Movie ‘Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Its Edge

To be a fan of horror is also to be a scholar, versed in the codes, rules, and lore that make the movies tick—and Jane Schoenbrun might as well have a PhD. Their new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, out August 7, is a winking meta-slasher, both an exaltation and an academic audit of the genre and all its time-honored tropes and sexual subliminals.The film stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an indie filmmaker tasked with rebooting the Sleepaway Camp-coded Camp Miasma franchise, which prompts her to track down the original film’s Final Girl, Billy, a glamorous recluse played by Gillian Anderson. As the two get to unpacking their respective relationships to the Miasma movies (and their archly-named killer, Little Death), subconscious fears and desires rise to the surface that can’t be outrun. What begins as a send-up of Hollywood reboot culture stuffed with tongue-in-cheek cinema-studies banter gradually sheds its scholastic skin and leans in, giving way to a panting, sensual phantasmagoria that climaxes in an explosion of red corn syrup.As in their previous films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow, Miasma finds Schoenbrun wearing their influences boldly on their sleeve—a bit of Lynch, a dash of Cronenberg—as they more broadly explore our relationships to the media we consume. Miasma is particularly interested in the refractive link between image and desire: how does media shape our fantasies, and in turn, our fantasies shape media?To that end, we sought to study Schoenbrun’s own relationship to the genre: they recently shared with us their personal slasher syllabus, breaking down the formative films (reboots included!) that influenced the making of Miasma.Psycho (1998)Universal/Everett CollectionJane Schoenbrun: It was really derided when it came out. I think it won some Razzies or whatever. It's a fun cast. It's an incredibly faithful shot-for-shot remake of the original film, keeping all of the '50s pastiche, but kind of casually updated for the '90s. It's so campy to see these people doing late '50s, early '60s sort of glammy dialogue in this contemporary setting. At the time, everyone was like, "Why did you do this?" but I found it so fascinating on rewatch.At that point, [Gus] Van Sant was known as a part of the New Queer Cinema movement, but he was just about to have his most interesting creative period, which was in the 2000s when he made Elephant, Paranoid Park, Last Days, and Gerry. If you watch these films, they're intensely technical. I almost think of them as geographic films. They're mostly interested in space and technique.So much of what makes Elephant so wonderful, and the same goes for Last Days or Gerry, is the attention to duration. You're watching one person walk down a hallway and then you see someone pass in the background, and then the film kind of circles back. They almost become these math equations of films. And re-watching the remake of Psycho, I was like, "Oh, this is a math equation of a film." He is studying the technique of Hitchcock in this incredibly formalist exercise.My cinematographer Eric K. Yue and I talked a lot about it, in terms of how musicians cover songs. When an artist covers a song, sometimes they'll just do a completely faithful remake. When Gus Van Sant does that for this movie from 40 years earlier, it is received with complete befuddlement. But as a filmic exercise, I find it fascinating.The other thing I find so fascinating is when he does make the decision to change something, because of how restrained and conservative he is in terms of paying complete faithful tribute to [the original], every tiny change draws attention to itself in a really fascinating way. And the one change that really sticks out, essentially the only significant plot detail that's changed, is for the iconic shot that we [also] kind of remake in my film, of Norman Bates peering through the crevice into the hotel room. The classic voyeur shot of him looking and there's a little sliver of light coming out. In the original Psycho, you see that. In Gus Van Sant's remake, you see that and he's masturbating.It’s like, “You spent years making this movie and completely kept yourself out of it, but that’s what you change?”Looking at it in the body of work of a filmmaker who is interested in the queer language of cinema in a very formal way; to surface the sexuality in that way, in such faithful conversation with the already very sexual language of Hitchcock's Psycho, there is a queering going on there that I find fascinating and deeply strange.Psycho II (1983)Universal/Everett CollectionSchoenbrun: Psycho II is another one I would shout out in my queer slasher canon. It's one that really moved me. It's Norman Bates kind of recovered, almost like he's been through conversion therapy, played once again by Anthony Perkins, towards the end of his life. He's reformed, but the killings start again and everyone thinks like, "Oh, you're putting the dress back on, aren't you?"As a closeted gay man in the early '80s, his performance is really dripping with this tender pain. The film feels really empathetic and loving towards the Norman Bates character in a way that [subverts] a lot of the homophobia or transphobia of the horror of the '80s. Seeing Anthony Perkins inhabit that role with remorse and humanity after the way the first one ends is really cool.Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)New Line Cinema/Everett CollectionSchoenbrun: It's so much better than it has any right to be as the third in the series. I love the original Nightmare on Elm Street, but the third one might be pound-for-pound my favorite. It's all these kids in a mental hospital, and they learned that they can meet each other in their dreams, and they can be anyone they want to be in their dreams, and they can fight Freddy Krueger. There's this one girl who's like, "In my dreams, I'm bad!" and she's got this leather outfit and a switchblade. It's just ecstatic and queer in a really fun way.Evil Dead II (1987)Sarah Berry and Bruce Campbell in ‘Evil Dead II’Everett CollectionSchoenbrun: Probably the biggest influence cinematically on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Evil Dead II, which was one of those movies that changed my life when I rented it on VHS at age 12 or something. I probably rented that movie a dozen times. It's so joyful in its excess. It was one of those movies where it's not like, "Oh, my God, that's so gross, ew, I need to go puke." It was like, "Oh, my God, they're just spraying hoses of blood in every direction."It's giddy in this way that I wanted my film to feel giddy. In re-watching it as I do every year, and as I make films, you realize that A) it's Sam Raimi making a live-action cartoon. It's like Looney Tunes. And B) it's him enjoying every trick in the filmmaker's toolkit. He does every crazy gag or gimmick or matte-painted backdrop, stop-motion claymation, practical effects. Every crazy thing he can think to do, they're doing it in this way that just feels uncomplicated and in love with cinema.Also, Bruce Campbell as a performer, fighting his own hand, is literally... I love dance on film. And to me, that movie is like ballet. It's so beautiful. The movement is so elegant. I think of it as a dance film.Friday the 13th: Part 2 (1981)Paramount/Everett CollectionSchoenbrun: Friday the 13th: Part 2 is one of two in that series that features the iconic skewering during sex, which obviously is a big inspiration on Camp Miasma. There are two characters on the second floor of the counselor's cabin in bed and they're having sex, and you're cross-cutting to Jason’s POV as he's walking up the stairs. And then one of them sees him out of the corner of their eye and their eye goes wide. And then it's like, stab right through. I was like, "Okay, yes, that scene, but what if the girl had the best orgasm of her life right as she was stabbed? That would probably mess her up for life." And that was one of the initial thoughts around my movie.Peeping Tom (1960)Everett CollectionSchoenbrun: Another one of those movies where you watch it and it completely erases the notion that cinema gets more provocative as you trace it chronologically through the decades. To me, that film is way ahead of our time, not just in its provocation but in its Freudian commitment to the sort of flesh and fluids of it all. Specifically alongside Psycho, it kind of invented the genre.You've got the camera as a sort of prosthesis, like the character can't exist outside of filmmaking. And so the camera becomes his weapon, and then it literally becomes his weapon [because] there's this phallic tripod knife that juts out from the camera. So he is achieving satisfaction through the filming and also penetrating his victims on the other side of the lens. And then he’s obsessively re-watching it on 16mm. That set [design] was huge for Camp Miasma. My production designers, Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland, and I looked a ton at his projection room [as inspiration] for Billy's cinema in Miasma.There's this Michael Powell quote where he says, "Cinema is the meeting ground of Christianity and perverts," which I love. That film… What a text to study if you're trying to make a movie about what this movie's about.