Six Slasher Movies That Gave Jane Schoenbrun's Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Its Edge

Key Points:

• Jane Schoenbrun's new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is a meta-slasher that both celebrates and critically examines horror genre tropes, focusing on the relationship between media, desire, and identity.
• The film stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an indie filmmaker rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise, and Gillian Anderson as the original Final Girl, Billy, exploring subconscious fears and desires beneath the slasher surface.
• Schoenbrun draws heavily on influences from iconic horror and cult films such as Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998), Psycho II, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Evil Dead II, Friday the 13th: Part 2, and Peeping Tom, blending queer themes and formal cinematic techniques.
• Notably, Schoenbrun appreciates Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho remake as a formalist queer exercise, and highlights the empathetic portrayal of Norman Bates in Psycho II as a subversion of 1980s horror homophobia.
• The film channels the joyous excess of Evil Dead II and the provocative, Freudian intensity of Peeping Tom, using these inspirations to explore the interplay of sexuality, violence, and media consumption in horror cinema.