When Jane Schoenbrun was a child, they went with their parents to the movies. The local multiplex was playing James and the Giant Peach, and the future filmmaker was ready to settle in for an afternoon of animated fun involving grasshoppers, glowworms, and centipedes, oh my! There was, however, a slight hitch regarding the Schoenbrun family’s plan. Which they realized the minute the lights went down and a different movie started up.

“We accidentally went into the theater showing Scream,” Schoebrun says. “I don’t know if you remember how that movie starts, but it just says the word ‘Scream,’ and then there’s a slash through the screen. I have this sense memory of almost, like, shitting my pants. I got up and literally sprinted out of the theater.”

Both Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson — the stars of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun’s new film that premiered at Cannes the previous evening and opened the festival’s Un Certain Regard section — burst into laughter. Then Einbinder lets out an “aww” and puts her hand on the writer-director’s shoulder.

“I must have been seven when that came out,” Schoenbrun says, scrunching their face slightly at the memory. “But by the time I was eight, I was obsessed with horror movies. They had the exact same attraction as, you know, the porn magazine in the woods — this forbidden but very alluring, very scary thing. I remember the feeling of being in the horror section at the video store, and it was like you weren’t supposed to go over there — even the boxes could be potentially dangerous. “But it’s also like: Child’s Play 3? Puppetmaster 4?” Their eyes open wide. “What’s happening here?!”

Say what you will about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — it most assuredly understands the way that certain types of formative experiences and certain types of very alluring, very scary movies can be combined in a way that becomes the equivalent of psychosexual gunpowder. A tale about simultaneously living your truth and embracing your kink, Schoenbrun’s homage to the nasty, gnarly slasher flicks that filled grindhouses in the early 1980s tills the fertile ground of fandom, forging identities, and the way that one person’s pulp fiction can become another’s sexual awakening. (It opens in theaters on August 7th.)

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And like their previous film, the 2024 insta-cult favorite I Saw the TV Glow, this story of a young director and a veteran scream queen centers around a nostalgia for yesteryear’s pop cultural touchstones. Instead of a Buffy-like television show, however, this one recreates a fictional slasher franchise called Camp Miasma, a typical homicidal-maniac-versus-horny-teens-in-the-woods series that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Friday the 13th movies. The series’ iconic and endlessly respawnable killer known as Little Death even wears a mask, though not a hockey one; it’s more like a cross between a ceiling vent and an air conditioner.

The opportunity to recreate the look and feel of those old trash-cinema classics, as well as the hallmarks of era’s exploitation gems — from the VHS boxes of the numerous Camp Miasma sequels to the merchandising-friendly Halloween costumes and video games — was part of the appeal. “The best days on TV Glow were the days where I got to just do Buffy, you know?” Schoenbrun admits, referring to the movie’s take on a monster-of-the-week show, The Pink Opaque. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re doing a Buffy [scene] right now. Great!’ It’s like me as a kid having fun. But I’m too much of a pseudo-intellectual to fully allow myself to go full pastiche. I need to cake the pastiche; if a character’s watching it, that’s ok. And getting the chance to put on those costumes, so to speak, is going to feel like childhood joy. Shitty internet horror videos, supernatural ’90s television, ’80s video-nasty-type slasher films — these are all genres that I just live and breathe. They’re in my DNA.”

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There’s a palpable sense of affection for those vintage parables of teenage sex and death, to be sure, but Schoenbrun is after bigger game than just fashioning a bloody valentine to the subgenre. An opening montage traces the Camp Miasma movies’ arc from reliable moneymakers to ridiculous-sequel fodder. We follow the internet headlines that revisit the films as problematic relics of a times-were-different-then past, and their eventual revision into kitschy nostalgia-bait. A young, Sundance-annointed filmmaker named Kris (Einbinder) has been hired to resurrect the “zombie I.P.” by producers hoping to reboot the franchise for the 21st century. She cynically assumes that she’s been chosen for the gig because she’s queer, and will thus stave off accusations that this homophobic, transphobic franchise should have been left for dead. Still, Kris knows this is a big opportunity. Plus she has a potential ace up her sleeve.

Because Kris has managed to get an audience with the reclusive star of the old Camp Miasma movies, Billy Preston (Anderson). This First Lady of Final Girls has long since retired from the business, and now resides in the middle of nowhere in the snowy Pacific Northwest. Well, not exactly “nowhere” — Billy actually lives on the summer-camp site where they filmed most of the Miasma flicks back in the day. Like Norma Desmond, she seems content to live a virtual museum of her glory days. Kris wants to convince Billy to be in this “requel,” and thus establish a sense of continuity. After dinner, Billy invites her guest to spend the night. What happens next involves empowerment, trauma, healing, the most sensual sequence of seduction by dipping sauces ever filmed, and a good deal of sex and death of the non-teenage variety.

Schoenbrun, who identifies as non-binary and trans, had been quoted prior to premiere as saying that their latest work is essentially a parable for enjoying sex after transitioning. Some thought they might have been joking. But once you see the way in which Kris and Billy use both the iconography — and literal geography — of the old movies to liberate their libidos, it’s clear that the filmmaker is anything but glib about their film being an ode to flying your freak flag proudly and learning to love what truly gets you off.

“I think I speak for all of us when… listen, I’ll just say it and you guys just hop off if you don’t want to be on this train,” Schoenbrun says, to another wave of collective laughter. “We want the film to help people have good sex. We want the film to help people feel good in their bodies and feel less shame and more courage. For me, every time you embark on a new project or a new art form, you risk complete embarrassment. If you’re going to get through to something worth doing and saying, it requires this radical vulnerability to put yourself out there — and that’s what sex is. It’s like, there’s no way to have sex while being in your head and thinking, ‘I’ve got to do this right!’

“But that is so not a message we are getting culturally,” the director adds, as Einbinder and Anderson nod in agreement. “The message that we are getting about sex is that it’s this discrete act between these discrete two genders. If you’re a woman, the pleasure is not about you, it’s about getting the approval of this other person. And if you’re a man, it’s all about the subjectification of this object. I always get the question of, ‘Why does Gen Z hate sex?’ It doesn’t take a fucking psychologist to figure this out. Those with eyes to see can look at our culture of sexuality and be like, ‘Something’s not great here.'”

It was, in fact, the highly personal aspect of using the trapping of old-school trash cinema to examine the boundaries people put up around their own notably NSFW desires that brought both Einbinder and Anderson on board. The Hacks star was already a die-hard Schoenbrun fan and immediately responded to the script’s highly satirical aspects, notably around “the tokenization of queer people in our industry.” The more she delved into Kris’s awakening, however, the more she found herself personally relating with the movie’s idea of freeing your mind so your erogenous zones can follow. “I’m from L.A., and by no means grew up in a conservative environment,” Einbinder says. “But I’m just, like, kind of two years behind, maybe more, of an awakening around sex and gender in a mainstream way. I hope it’s gonna do what it did for me and us for others.”

“It wasn’t until we started doing press,” Anderson notes, “that I began to realize… I’ve taken on a lot of characters that, for all intensive purposes, I have no similarities with whatsoever in my personal life and my history. But when I was young, you know, I was in the only gay relationship in my high school at that particular time, at age 13. Midsummer, I dressed in sweaters and heavy jackets. And even when my parents would go to the beach, I would dress like that to the beach, with my combat boots on. I was just I was covered up, and that was my shame, right?

“And until I was literally sitting here like, you know, having this flashback,” the former X Files actor continues, “that I wish that I’d had this movie growing up. I don’t have my own experience with intense fandom. There was never anything other than music, especially punk rock, that I became obsessed with. So I never really understood it. But had this film existed when I was that age, I can absolutely imagine that it would have been my lifeline.” Anderson lets a long sigh. “Fuck, man.”

It’s worth noting that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is anything but a collegiate lecture or academic treatise — the title alone gives you a sense of its cheeky joie de vivre. Kris essentially gets the Miasma reboot gig because her breakthrough work was a reworking of Psycho, “but retold from the point of view of the shower curtain.” There are a lot of knowing nods and winks to past horror landmarks as well, notably Videodrome and The Shining, and more than a few gentle ribbings of the clichés of the Golden Age of slashers. Several sequences are candy-colored, and many are filled with copious amounts of actual brand-name candy. And then there is a gory massacre scene from the original Camp Miasma, in which Little Death (played by TV Glow‘s Jack Haven) slaughters dozens of unlucky campers to a highly unusual, anachronistic hit song from the 1990s.

“So here’s how ‘A Long December’ ended up in the film,” Schoenbrun says. “Fun fact, I have a cousin who was a guitar tech for the Counting Crows. I was like a Counting Crows super fan at, like, 10 years old. I got to go backstage and meet the band. That meant a lot to me. In the script, that sequence was going to be set to ‘Nightswimming,’ by R.E.M., and then I was like, ‘Shoot. There might be a better piano ballad for this.’ I love that song, and when you put a song in a movie, you risk ruining it for yourself forever.” [Note: a cover of the R.E.M. track does show up in another scene.]

“And I’ve never stop loving ‘A Long December,'” the filmmaker adds. “Every time I hear it, I think it’s the pinnacle of a certain kind of, like, mainstream pop rock. It’s so beautiful, and has that resigned hopefulness: ‘Next year is going to be better than the last.’ I really wanted Little Death to chop someone’s head off every time Adam Durwitz said ‘Hollywood’ in the song — that was another thing. The person who broke the tie for me was Lindsay [Erin Jordan] from Snail Mail. I was texting her, and asked: ‘Nightswimming’ or ‘Long December’… what would you rather [hear] played over a five-minute killing spree? She was like, ‘That is a really hard fucking question. But I think it’s got to be ‘December.’”

Like so much of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, it’s an oddball choice that completely fits within the world Schoenbrun has created — a mix of irony and genuine admiration, outrageousness and tenderness, giggles and gore that eventually gives way to an intimate, heartfelt sense of connection. Without giving away the ending, it is safe to say that the film climaxes on a note of hopefulness in terms of achieving la petite mort on a more regular basis. The fact that we leave our heroes covered head to toe in blood only adds to Grand-Guignol emotional rush of it all.

“So I have sensory issues,” Einbinder says, when the movie’s conclusion is mentioned. “like noise issues, feelings on my skin, etc., in a very neurodivergent way. Those scenes where we’re covered in blood… it was, like, really challenging for me. The worst sensation for me is my skin being wet, and then any fabric touching it — that is something that causes me, like, pain in a way that’s so unsettling. I probably shouldn’t say this on the record, because my enemies are going to read it and find this out.”

“But the first time I watched the film,” she adds, “I saw a shot where I’m in close-up near the front of the frame, completely covered in blood — and that is, to me, the most beautiful I have ever felt or looked. I feel that’s like the best image of myself I’ve ever seen. I love it so much.”

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Schoenbrun smiles. Einbinder looks lovingly over at her costar, who beams back at her.

“I mean, throughout my career, I’ve been in a lot of uncomfortable situations where I’ve had to wait many, many hours, covered in all kinds of things,” Anderson says. “So it felt just like another day at work.”