Jane Schoenbrun's new slasher film deconstructs queer horror at Fantasia

Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal this month, is a meta-textual slasher about a queer filmmaker named Kris (Hannah Einbinder) hired to reboot a popular and problematic slasher franchise. She returns to an abandoned mountain set where the original series was shot, where she meets Billy (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive final girl from those films.

The film's murderer, Little Death, wields a whale's harpoon and wears an air vent on their head — absurd and terrifying in equal measure. During one sequence, Little Death goes on a killing spree through a pop song, massacring campers in extravagant, gleeful showboating. But Schoenbrun locates the real horror deeper: in vulnerable bodies facing imminent death, in the tension between destruction and deconstruction.

Schoenbrun's previous films — We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow — used genre to explore alienation and gender. This time, genre becomes a vehicle for interrogating how horror has historically coded queer and trans bodies as threatening. The film draws heavily on Carol J. Clover's pivotal essay "Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film," playing with audience identification: Are we perpetrators or victims? Schoenbrun toys with the knife — literally and metaphorically — asking whether penetration with a weapon is so different from other forms of penetration.

Schoenbrun grew up drawn to the horror section at the video store. "And then you figure out that you can not just be a weird kid, and you can transition," they explained during the film's introduction. "But then it was like, those horror movies all have those fucked up trans people." Teenage Sex and Death specifically subverts films like Sleepaway Camp, reclaiming infamous imagery not just as an act of reclamation but recontextualization. Famous trans-coded moments are revisited and repurposed.

Hannah Einbinder emphasized the film's ironic distance: "Detach yourself from your understanding of genre and what that means." Schoenbrun offers audiences what they expect from a slasher while embracing theoretical depth informed by queer cinema and feminist film criticism.

The approach is grounded in what Schoenbrun calls "queer joy" — a deliberate shift. "It was so great to make the movie from a place of joy and looseness at a time when movies are kinda dark and this one is kinda happy." The result is a film that honors the franchises Schoenbrun loved as a kid while refusing to replicate the harm those films encoded.