In Jane Schoenbrun’s Blood-Soaked World, Intimacy Is the Greatest Horror

In Jane Schoenbrun’s filmography to date, characters have touched screens more than each other.In both We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, the hazy specter of computer monitors and boxy CRTs serve as fantastical portals with the capacity to both trap and transform their beholders. The isolated protagonists of each feature seek a sort of mediated self-actualization through their pop-culture obsessions of choice, inevitably landing somewhere within the world of horror, whether it’s an internet creepypasta or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like serial drama.This grappling with identity is an overwhelmingly internal affair in both films, with other characters largely relegated to the background as distant, looming forces. In 2024, New Yorker critic Richard Brody named Schoenbrun a “poet of solitude” — perhaps a fitting designation up to that point. But that all changes in their new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which exults in the fleshy meeting of bodies: in bloody kills, throes of ecstasy, or some oozing combination of the two.“I thought, ‘I need to make sure this is a body movie, not a head movie,’” Schoenbrun tells Them. “It moves from the head to the body: skin performance, bodies moving and interacting with each other. I think it’s the best thing you can film.” Tanner Abel for Them Camp Miasma opens on arguably the least sensual endeavor out there: mounting the resurrection of tired IP for a major studio. Anxious queer filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is the latest creative tasked with bringing the long-dormant eponymous franchise back from the dead. The film’s opening credits, which take us through Camp Miasma’s janky lifecycle, are rife with real-life horror Easter eggs (down to a crack at Friday the 13th sequel Jason Takes Manhattan’s dismal box-office returns). Somehow, Schoenbrun tells Them, Hollywood’s reboot churn has only grown more self-cannibalizing the further we inch into the 21st cen