When Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma had its world premiere at Cannes in May, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun was working really, really hard to take it all in. Schoenbrun even got good advice from the film’s star, Hannah Einbinder, who reminded the filmmaker “of that feeling where this is already the past, while you’re living it.”
But as hard as Schoenbrun was trying to stay present, they also kept thinking about their own past, too.
“There have been a few things where if you told me they happened, a previous version of me would have overheated,” Schoenbrun tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “Like, smoke would have started pouring out of my ears. So just getting to be there and screen at the Palais and feel that level of surreal achievement — I try to not live my life based on getting those kinds of thrills, but I allowed myself that one.”
Winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes and coming to theaters this weekend via Mubi, Camp Miasma is — much like Schoenbrun’s previous two films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow — deeply influenced by the pop culture that grabbed hold of Schoenbrun’s imagination as a child growing up in Ardsley, a village in New York’s suburban Westchester County.
In the film, Einbinder plays Kris, a young filmmaker who’s taken the job of rebooting the fictional ’80s slasher series Camp Miasma. We see a brief flashback image of Kris as a child, leaning so close to a television screen showing a Camp Miasma movie that it seems like it might absorb her. As Schoenbrun tells me in our conversation, that flashback scene was actually a late addition to the production schedule, but it became a key visual element of one of the film’s main themes.
“As she says, ‘I saw too many movies, and it fucked me up for life,’” Schoenbrun, 39, tells me. “I think there’s something really powerful to that. And there’s something really moving, if you think about that not as an individual experience, but a cultural experience that we all have.”
But Schoenbrun will be the first to tell you that Camp Miasma is also supposed to be a lot of fun, with many of the same thrills as an actual slasher movie as well as simmering sexual tension between Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, playing the actress who starred in the first Camp Miasma slasher movie before mysteriously disappearing. At a series of festival screenings that have happened since Cannes, Schoenbrun tells me, “the crowds have been really raucous, and the movie wants that. This movie is made to be a really good time in a dark theater.”
On today’s episode of the podcast, Schoenbrun digs deep into Camp Miasma’s origins and how the “specific life explosion” that led to their first two films made room for something different with this one. We talk about David Lynch, movie theater candy, sexual liberation and, eventually, how to dismantle capitalism while still having slasher movie merch. The movie is a rich text; what can I tell you!
Today’s podcast also features the kickoff to the five-part fall movie preview series I’ll be doing throughout August with my colleague Christopher Rosen and a cavalcade of favorite returning guests. We started by welcoming Entertainment Weekly’s Joyce Eng back to the show to look at what the major studios have in store for this Oscar season. Can anything beat The Odyssey? Can Dune: Part Three live up to the Return of the King comparisons? And is The Social Reckoning even coming out this year? Don’t worry, we get into all of it.
