The Brooklyn Rail

In the half decade since We’re All Going to the World’s Fair earned writer/director Jane Schoenbrun their laurels as cinematic queer soothsayer for the digital age, their work has blended intimate portraiture with queasy, hypermodern dissociation. This May, their third feature, a surreally comic, slickly postmodern slasher about, well, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, earned them the Queer Palm at Cannes.

Schoenbrun’s latest follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young, up-and-coming queer filmmaker tasked with helming the first in what her studio hopes will be an IP refresh for Camp Miasma, an old slasher franchise with a transphobic villain. When she embarks on a fact-finding mission to pick the brain of the series’ now reclusive original final girl (Gillian Anderson), she finds herself enmeshed in a hallucinatory and erotic tangle of fact, fiction, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s an exploration of how our desires and self-conceptions are shaped by and articulated through the media we consume, a rejection of passive nostalgia as an end in itself. It’s also a horror-comedy romp more than fit for its August release date.

I met with the filmmaker on Zoom a few days after they returned from Cannes for a long conversation about the dangers of IP, the books that make them tick, the beauty of being embarrassing, and the power of independent cinema to make people feel seen.

Payton McCarty-Simas (Rail): How are you feeling? You just won the Queer Palm! That’s amazing.

Jane Schoenbrun: Thank you! I’m feeling good. Whatever the opposite of ego death is, that’s what Cannes was like. It’s funny, I love making movies, but promoting movies is always a little bit hard. It’s exciting, obviously, there’s obviously a thrill, and there’s something moving about people feeling seen by my movies, but it doesn’t feel generative in the way that making the things feels generative. As such it feels a little less healthy or something [laughs]. I’ve done it a few times nowgone through the realization that, like, you’re the main character of your own news feed or whatever. But I’m still figuring out my relationship to that.

Rail: This one in particular is such an intimate story, too. I’ve never really seen this exact kind of narrative on screen, particularly not a screen that big. How does that feel? Is that vulnerable? Or does it feel distanced from you at this point?

Schoenbrun: I don’t think that what I feel is like, “Oh, people are watching my story,” or “People are engaging with the real me, my own autobiography,” or something, because the movie is obviously not quite that straightforward.

Rail: Well, it’s got that Charlie Kaufman-esque thing going on where it’s playing with the concept of autobiography.

Schoenbrun: Totally. But I think what it’s trying to do is open up space for things that aren’t spoken about, things that feel like, “Who would say that out loud?” It’s opening up space for those things to be said out loud, which I think I Saw the TV Glow and World’s Fair were attempting as well with different subject matter. That’s a cheat code that I’ve figured outbeing radically vulnerable and embarrassing, you know? Shouting the thing that would have felt embarrassing to say to one person really loud allows me to not feel embarrassed, and I think that it allows other people the same grace. Obviously this is a film about my own sexual coming of age happening in my post-transition thirties, but I would hate for the film to be regarded as only about that, right? I think that the film’s conversation around sexwhatever weird gaze we culturally have on sex, which is already so confused and violent and strange and dripping with weirdnessI’m trying to talk about it in a way that will hopefully be relatable to a lot of people who aren’t trans, but who similarly feel that their experience of sex and sexuality isn’t matched by our cultural depictions of it.

Rail: Definitely! As I was watching, I kept thinking about all of the different people I know who are going to really feel seen by that particular aspect across all manner of spectrums, so that’s wonderful, and I think very effective in the movie. At the same time, the other thing that’s cool about your work in general is that it’s both so personal, but the press kit for this one comes with what could be a college course syllabus in film theory. Can you talk to me about the more essayistic quality of your work? You’re talking about intellectual property and prequels and remakes from the perspective of being a very original queer filmmaker in this landscape, and I’d love to hear about that. But it’s funny too. This could be a cooler version of Scream! This movie’s got shades of Urban Legends: The Final Cut in there!

Schoenbrun: [Laughing] Thank you for the Urban Legends: Final Cut reference. A movie I think about often.

Rail: I was gonna say Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, but I thought that one might be a little too cringe.

Schoenbrun: I rep Book of Shadows for sure. I went to the movie theater for it on opening night. That was a moment. You just left a little confused, like “What?” Directed by Joe Berlinger, though! I remember the dyke goth girl character, and I remember the opening montage of talk shows talking about Blair Witch, and I remember very little else from Book of Shadowsbut I digress.

I think all I want to do as a filmmaker is find the form that is most authentic to me within this amazing medium that gives you so many tools to express yourself. I’m in love with film because it’s this amazing way to communicate. Narrative cinema, while very, very conservative in its usual commercial form, is such a beautiful and strange way to get to speak to a lot of other human beings. I take that opportunity very, very seriously, and the more I’ve done it, the more I’ve realized that, for me at least, the only goal is for each film to feel more and more authentically like me. I’m finding a language that allows me to communicate again, not autobiographically, but truthfully. I’m trying to express the way that I experience the mysteries of the world in the most expansive and honest way that hopefully will mean something to someone else.

Then, like Kris, Hannah’s character in the movie, I’m a pretty heady and cerebral person. As much as I’m existing ephemerally in the world and watching movies, in the creation process, so much inspiration for me comes from sitting on my couch and reading theory. Not film theoryhardly ever film theory, honestlybut gender theory, media theory. Right now I’m reading a lot about addiction theory. I’m the type of person who wants to investigate, and wants to investigate with others. I like the tone of the first section of the movie where it’s just two characters having what I think is just a really good conversation. That’s my preferred mode of communication with the people in my life, so it only makes sense that that would spill into the movie. I want to make movies that have something to talk about, because there’s a lot to talk about right now and not a lot of good cultural forms left through which we can talk about them.

Rail: I would love to talk a bit about commercialism and remakes with you. How do you feel about the IP hell that we live in right now where everything is so highly mediated through this hyper-corporate slop? This movie is really incisive about trying to cut through that noise, and it’s very funny on that score as well.

Schoenbrun: Oh, how do I feel about the IP hell that we live in right now? I mean, bad [laughing]. But IP becomes a fun, harmless way to talk about the deeper problems of this culture that we’re in right now, which just feels so deeply in love with its own past, or its idea of its own past. We’re so deeply infantilized and addicted to something that’s distracting us from the actual truth of the world around us: it isn’t in a good place and isn’t getting better. We seem to have a death wish as a society that we’re playing out with junk food on our screens and in our slop bowls, and it’s because anything else feels completely absurd and intangible, right? It’s that old Mark Fisher quote: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

At the same time, I am a true child of capitalist pop culture entertainment. The place I first saw magic was in the video store and on my television screen. So as an adult pseudointellectual snob leftist trans girl, any art that I’m going to make is going to be corrupted by those forms that I grew up on. I’m trying to make work that’s not just nostalgia-bait, that isn’t just trying to reify the imagined joy of one’s favorite childhood film. I’m exploring this tension of a world that’s deteriorating before our eyes. We’re a quarter into this new century and we’re still clinging to our imagined idea of the last one. That’s all pretty heavy duty stuff for schlocky slasher movies, but I want to communicate about these things and reach other people like me, and this is like where I go: to the slasher movie.

Rail: Absolutely. Now, in terms of slasher villains, you’ve obviously got Sleepaway Camp in there, and you’ve got a lot of giallo in there, too, but I’d love to hear about how you went about constructing this ur-slasher villain that queer people can understand on that score. How did you go about reifying and recuperating the jumpscare of transphobic slasher movies?

Schoenbrun: There are a few dimensions of it in the movie. In the movie within the movie, we have Little Death [Jack Haven] and his helmet. It had to be something uncanny and subliminal, but something that would feel believable if maybe just a tiny bit off from what you would have actually seen in one of these movies. That ceiling vent? Literally, I was just staring up at the ceiling when I couldn’t sleep a few years ago, and I was like, “Oh, there it is!” It’s kind of like power lines, you know? This is surrounding us, but we don’t actually pay attention to it. That felt good and simple, not downstream from Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. It felt like it could exist alongside them believably.

But then we get these different origin stories for him, right? There’s the origin story within the movie-within-the-movie of this trans kid who’s bullied and drowned and comes back for revenge, but then we also get Kris’s origin story that she pitches to the studio, which is a more expansive theoretical idea of what it means to be remaking this kind of iconography that mixes sex and death over and over again as a culture. Then you get Gillian [Anderson]’s character’s origin story that she tells at the campfire—her experience of coming into herself sexually that mixed trauma and desire and pleasure and pain. I hesitate to go too deep into my academic explanation of it though, because hopefully it’s generative material for people to dig through on their own.

Rail: In terms of your more academic orientation here, if you were to hand a casual viewer three books after watching this movie—things to spark the brains of people who are not familiar with this kind of material—what would they be?

Schoenbrun: I’m trying to think back to my reading list. Let me look it up… There’s this great book called Screening Sex by the film theorist Linda Williams that I read in the lead up to making the movie. It talks about the history of sex on screen, pre-code to now, and it talks a lot about the relationship between the audience and the sex scene: to what degree are you entering that scene in your own mind’s eye? I read that literally right before production, and it felt very, very, helpful.

Then there’s Eroticism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille. It’s a collection of his nonfiction writing about sex and the taboo around it as a line that we all socially and culturally construct. It’s in the construction of that line that desire likes to dwell.

Rail: I love it when Bataille just stunts on Foucault like that.

Schoenbrun: Yeah, totally [laughing]. Then, finally, you know, the obvious one would be Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws, but I think my third would be some Gilles Deleuze. When I first started talking about this movie, I would describe it as a “Deleuzian slasher.” What I meant by that is that it’s a slasher that works from the fundamentally optimistic viewpoint of humans as desiring machines. It’s a slasher where that sex-and-death line would be so screwed that you want to confront the possibilities of the slasher rather than the moralizing horrors of the slasher.

Rail: Maybe that’s why it’s more effective as a meta-slasher than the most recent Scream movie.

Schoenbrun: Totally. I saw Scream 7—maybe I shouldn’t have, but those movies meant so much to me. I woke up at like 4 a.m., and I was so upset that I wrote this down—let me read it to you. “Scream 7 felt grotesque, a complete energy void, a rotten husk of a movie that no one involved is even pretending is anything more than a cynical cash grab. In this way, it’s a pretty good encapsulation of our moment.”

Rail: [Laughing] While you were up staring at the ceiling vent that inspired Little Death?

Schoenbrun: [Laughing] Angry about what’s become of my beloved Scream franchise.

Rail: So when you’re pulling all these things together as you write, how do you balance those tones in your head?

Schoenbrun: You just think a lot about the experience of watching the movie, you know? It becomes harder and harder the deeper in you get, but you try to put yourself in an audience’s shoes and figure out what’s going to walk them through a confounding experience. With this one, I was really interested in making a movie that was very inviting. It was important to me early on to make the decision with myself that this wasn’t like a mix of six genres, but that this was a romance with slasher spice added. The heart of the movie is a romantic comedy.

Then structurally? I’m so bored by three-act structure, clearly [laughs]. I’m always trying to invent new forms to hold someone’s attention, and a big guidepost for me was this movie mirroring the act of queer sex in its structure. The queer sex that I’ve had that’s felt good starts with a lot of talking, maybe eating some junk food together and getting comfortable, then it starts, then it stops, then it starts again. It leaves a lot of space for warmth and the creation of a zone that can be both scary and safe. So that was a goal.

Rail: That completely rocks. In terms of the super-independent queer film scene that’s come up in the past couple of years—with things like the Castration Movie Anthology, The People’s Joker, Alice Maio Mackay’s movies, and on and on—what are you most excited about right now?

Schoenbrun: It’s been really moving for me to meet Alice and Vera Drew and Louise Weard and Avalon Fast and feel for the first time since transition that I’ve found a group of filmmakers who are peers in conversation with each other trying to create work that’s doing something that isn’t currently in our post-woke commercial machine where even the quote unquote “arthouse indie movies” look like they were filmed at WeWork. Like, Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys thrilled me beyond measure. It’s such a miracle of a movie. I remember watching The Love Witch for the first time and just being like, “How the fuck does this exist? And thank god it exists!” That was the feeling watching Fucktoys.

Those guys’ movies have all really moved me and made me feel like less alone as a filmmaker. I’d love to spend a week watching microbudget films made by people who aren’t white dudes. I want to start some kind of festival, mostly just so I can engage with these movies and engage with what culture is being made out there that isn’t being surfaced.