Jane Schoenbrun Is Becoming One Of The Most Fascinating Filmmakers Working Today

I am certainly looking forward to what Jane Schoenbrun cooks up next.

After watching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun has now moved beyond the stage where I Saw the TV Glow can simply be treated as an exciting breakthrough and has started to establish something much more valuable for a filmmaker - a body of work that can be connected by ideas rather than by a specific genre.

I Saw the TV Glow changed the conversation around Schoenbrun

Yes, I know I Saw the TV Glow wasn’t for everyone, and lots found it boring, but there is also no avoiding I Saw the TV Glow when discussing Schoenbrun, not just because it won so many awards, but also because it wasn’t simply successful just as a slightly unusual existential horror movie, it also managed to connect with people who recognised something in its treatment of nostalgia, television fandom, identity and the uncomfortable feeling of realising that the life you are living might not be the life you actually wanted.

Schoenbrun managed to take ideas that could easily have resulted in a conventional coming-of-age story and filtered them through the language of television horror, creating something that felt deeply personal without needing to explain every emotion directly, and the danger after a film like that is that a filmmaker can become trapped by their own big breakthrough.

Schoenbrun’s response was Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which takes many of the filmmaker’s existing interests and places them inside a much more openly playful and sexually charged piece of genre cinema.

Schoenbrun’s movies are about the things we become obsessed with

The easiest way to describe Schoenbrun as a filmmaker is probably not to call them a horror director at all, because horror is really the language they use to explore a much broader fascination with obsession, where their films repeatedly look at people who become deeply attached to pieces of popular culture and begin using those fictional worlds as a way of understanding themselves.

That idea appears through internet culture in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, becomes much more emotionally direct through television in I Saw the TV Glow and now appears through the deliberately exaggerated world of the slasher movie.

That progression also clearly shows that Schoenbrun isn’t simply collecting different forms of nostalgia and putting them into horror films, as they are seem to also be more interested in the emotional relationship people develop with media, and anyone who has ever felt that a particular movie, television show, musician or fictional character somehow understood them better than the people around them, will probably recognise what Schoenbrun is exploring.

Camp Miasma shows a different side to the filmmaker

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma showed just how comfortable Schoenbrun can be with simply having fun, as while the earlier films could be incredibly heavy emotionally, even when they were dealing with bizarre or surreal material, the new movie embraces the ridiculousness of its own premise and the traditions of the slasher genre.

Schoenbrun has also discussed the film in interviews, describing it as a much more liberating experience and connecting its sexuality and sense of freedom to their own experiences, which I think makes the change in tone particularly significant because the film’s interest in sex isn’t simply an attempt to make a more provocative horror movie either.

The casting of Gillian Anderson also says something about the kind of filmmaker Schoenbrun has become, as Anderson arrives with decades of genre history behind her, particularly because The X-Files made her one of the defining faces of genre television for an entire generation.

Schoenbrun’s films are fascinated by the relationship between performers and the audiences who watch them, so bringing somebody with Anderson’s particular cultural history into this world feels considerably more deliberate than simply casting a recognisable actor - a movie can understand the history of something, recognise how absurd some of its conventions are and still genuinely love the people who made those conventions meaningful to audiences, which is one of the reasons Camp Miasma doesn’t feel like the sort of smug postmodern horror movie that exists primarily to demonstrate how many references its filmmakers can recognise.

The slasher genre makes more sense for Schoenbrun than it initially appears

On paper, a slasher seems like a strange direction for the filmmaker responsible for I Saw the TV Glow, but the more closely you look at Schoenbrun’s work, the more natural it also seems to become.

The slasher is a genre built around anxieties concerning adolescence, sexuality, bodies and identity, while also being one of the most heavily codified forms of popular cinema, with rules that audiences understand almost instinctively, which means a filmmaker can use those rules while simultaneously examining what those rules say about the people watching the movie.

That is precisely the sort of territory Schoenbrun seems drawn towards, because they are interested in the gap between what popular culture tells us something is supposed to mean and what it actually means to the individual person experiencing it - slasher movies can tell audiences that sex leads to punishment, that certain bodies are vulnerable and that survival requires conforming to a particular role, but Schoenbrun can take those assumptions and start asking what happens when somebody refuses to accept them.

Schoenbrun doesn’t seem interested in becoming predictable

There is something quite refreshing too about the fact that Schoenbrun hasn’t tried to turn I Saw the TV Glow into a formula, because the film could easily have created a career in which every subsequent project was described as another nostalgic, surreal horror movie about identity, with increasingly obvious comparisons being made between each release.

Instead, Schoenbrun has followed it with something that retains the same underlying fascination with popular culture while changing the tone, genre mechanics and emotional perspective, and that is usually a much better sign for a filmmaker’s career than simply producing another successful version of the same movie.

Directors who develop a distinctive style often discover that their greatest strength eventually becomes their greatest limitation because we, as the audience, begin expecting the same experience from them every time, but Schoenbrun appears to be avoiding that problem by allowing their interests to remain consistent while their filmmaking continues to change.

And as a movie watcher, I find that quite exciting, because Schoenbrun’s ambitions at this point already seem considerably larger than horror, with their work across film and writing continuing to revolve around fictional worlds, fandom and the ways people use media to understand themselves, and that means there is a coherent artistic identity underneath projects that might initially appear completely unrelated.

Their upcoming adaptation work, including their involvement with Black Hole, suggests that this fascination with the darker side of popular culture is likely to remain important even as the scale and form of their projects changes, and three narrative feature films into their career, Schoenbrun now has something that is surprisingly difficult for filmmakers to achieve - there is a clear connection between the movies, but there isn’t yet a rigid formula connecting them.

You can recognise a Schoenbrun film through its fascination with media, identity, obsession and the strange emotional power of fictional worlds, while still having very little idea what form the next project might take, which is probably the most exciting position a filmmaker can occupy.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma did not need to replace I Saw the TV Glow, and it also did not need to prove that Schoenbrun can make the same kind of film again, because its real value is that it demonstrates how much room there is inside Schoenbrun’s particular cinematic interests, and I, for one, am certainly excited for their future projects.

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