(CNN) — A teenage girl named Billy is having sex for the first time – sex she consented to verbally, but reluctantly. She had to be talked into it. It’s awkward, uncomfortable. In her eyes, you can see that she’s not entirely there – she’s somewhere else, like a spectator, outside her body looking in.
Director Jane Schoenbrun’s slick new slasher fantasy film, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” paints the banalities of bad sex like the one Billy (the aforementioned teen, played by Amanda Fix) has as a villain on par with Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers – and makes an argument for pursuing fantasy and pleasure as a path to self-actualization.
It’s a movie, Schoenbrun said, “about learning how to have good sex.” That’s a skill Schoenbrun, a 39-year-old trans filmmaker, had to learn “after many, many years pre-transition of being just like fully dissociative and avoidant around sex.”
The director says it’s hard to have good sex “unless you’re present in your own self and body and identity, which was foreclosed to me before I became myself in transition.”
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” which scored the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, is Schoenbrun’s most mainstream venture yet, with name-brand stars (“Hacks” actress Hannah Einbinder and “X-Files” legend Gillian Anderson) and a real marketing budget. It’s an experimental love letter to the schlocky slasher films of the ‘80s (with gore that leans camp) and a stoner romantic comedy dressed up as an erotic thriller that critiques horror’s transphobic tropes. But it’s sex — and the struggle to be present enough to have it well — that provides the most fertile material for Schoenbrun to play with.
In film critic and writer Payton McCarty-Simas’ words, “it’s about how sometimes when you’re queer, it’s hard to get off.”
Dissociation blues
“I Saw the TV Glow” helmer Schoenbrun has become something of a cult sensation for their reference-rich experiments in horror, which are at once cerebral – Foucault references are dropped deftly – and emotionally hefty.
In “Teenager Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” Einbinder plays Kris, a queer filmmaker as well as a self-described “prude” and “intellectual,” who’s more comfortable reciting academic theory than communicating with her girlfriend. She’s a rising star who’s been recruited to resuscitate a stagnant, transphobic ‘80s franchise, the titular “Camp Miasma,” with her stamp of queer approval. “They’re looking for elevated, aka woke,” quips Kris’ agent, played by a perfectly annoying Sarah Sherman.
As part of the research for her remake, Kris goes searching for actress Billy, who played the “final girl” in the original film-within-a-film and helped trigger her own sexual awakening. She finds the older star – played by Anderson as an elegant femme fatale with a luxurious Southern twang – living as a mysterious recluse a la Norma Desmond on the real abandoned camp where the original movie was filmed.
They start a romance that’s both tender and tantalizing. The tension between the two is alive and pulsing as they dance around each other on Billy’s eerie compound, flirting over junk food and discussing their approaches to life and art.
But when they first fall in bed together, things don’t quite work. Kris is grimacing, unable to communicate what she wants. She’s out of her body, somewhere else entirely.
The scene strangely rhymes with the dissociative loss-of-virginity story Billy reveals to Kris, one that’s shown in flashback throughout and mirrors the above-mentioned scene we see from the ’80s camp slasher. Dissociation – being outside yourself, looking in – even takes on a corporeal form with the film’s silent voyeuristic villain, Little Death (Jack Haven), who uses a massive harpoon to turn unsuspecting teens into glittering geysers of blood and wears a helmet shaped like a ceiling vent – the kind you might gaze up into while enduring unsatisfying intercourse.
Billy’s experience having sex for the first time lies somewhere on the spectrum between traumatic and disappointing. “I told myself it was a rite of passage,” she recalls to Kris. “I felt hollow. It meant nothing to me. I tried to stop being myself on the bed.”
Kris, too, wants to stop being herself. She says she’s “never been able to get there with someone else unless I’m somewhere else.” She explains that she feels safest in the realm of the unreal: In her fantasy, she’s in “Camp Miasma,” being transformed from herself, the repressed filmmaker, to a slasher archetype, “a victim, a slut.” Billy and Kris both feel safest, paradoxically, on the set of a horror film.
The scene is moving both for its low-key, tender portrayal of queer intimacy (be gone, lurid depictions of lesbian sex from cinema past) and for its candid declaration that sex can be scary – even when you’re with a partner you want and trust. It’s hard to let your guard down – to be yourself, completely, with someone else.
Schoenbrun described shooting the film’s sex scenes as “emotionally visceral” because of the intense vulnerability they capture. In some way, the filmmaker explains, “my directing the sex scenes is like what the movie is talking about: coming into one’s own capability and identity as a filmmaker, and as a sexual person.”
In the film, Billy keeps reassuring Kris, “It’s all just play,” when they have sex and when they’re running from a murderous slasher. Both sex and the set pieces of a slasher film become a playground for the characters to run around in – discarding and distorting the predictable scripts and stock tropes that overburden both.
Safe danger
Turning something scary into something playful and fun is how Schoenbrun describes post-transition sex, too. Having sex after transitioning required creating “a space where going to places that are scary or dark or embarrassing feels exciting and safe.”
“In a lot of ways, that’s what the movie is about,” Schoenbrun said.
Using the slasher genre as the bones for their exploration of bad sex also makes sense since the genre “is just so obsessed with sexual ritual and with gender and gender deviance and figures of like abnormality or gender monstrosity,” they said. Horror films have historically been swathed in transphobia, with villains from “Psycho’s” Norman Bates to “Silence of the Lambs”’ Buffalo Bill depicted as cross-dressing or otherwise troubling gender. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” itself heavily references “Sleepaway Camp,” a notoriously transphobic low-budget ‘80s slasher. In part, Schoenbrun said, the intent was “to remake a lot of that imagery towards something that can feel liberatory” by capturing the way a horror movie can be like sex: both can create an opportunity to explore what scares you in a safe environment.
Watching a horror movie, says Schoenbrun, is kind of like “riding a roller coaster – it’s like safe danger,” the same “safe danger that needed to be conjured in order to heal these very scary and tender parts of myself.”
Personal and visceral
The film may have been born out of Schoenbrun’s specific experience as a trans person, but the experience it portrays packs a universal punch.
Much of the sex in the film between Einbinder and Anderson’s characters is light-hearted and playful. There’s fried chicken involved, and a bed of iridescent gas station candy at one point (Schoenbrun says having good sex requires “a lot of junk food, in my experience”). It’s fun – unlike your prototypical slasher film, in which having sex always condemns a character to certain doom, a trope so tired it’s been called “death by sex.” But in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” sex – good sex at least, the kind where you’re honest about what you want no matter how much it scares you – doesn’t invite death, but rather joy.
It’s after Billy and Kris consummate their romance that the edge between the present day and the set of the original “Camp Miasma” disintegrates and the film’s premise explodes into a kaleidoscopic wonderland of romance, sex, glee, and gore – and our horror-loving leads basically take off frolicking through it.
It’s “like a sugar rush that is, I think, still tender,” said Schoenbrun.
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