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, I think Schoenbrun has reached the point where I Saw the TV Glow can no longer just be talked about as an exciting breakthrough, as yes, it was a big film for them, obviously, but what is becoming more interesting is what comes after it - because Schoenbrun is starting to build something that is much harder for a filmmaker to achieve - connections between the films, but without feeling like the same movie being made over and over again.

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

I don't really think of Schoenbrun as a horror director either, even though horror is obviously a huge part of their work, but it feels more like the language they use to talk about something much bigger - obsession, identity and the strange relationships people can develop with the things they watch.

That idea is there in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, where the internet becomes this strange space for someone trying to figure themselves out, while I Saw the TV Glow takes that idea somewhere much more personal through television, and finally Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma throws it into the world of the slasher.

What interests me about that progression is that Schoenbrun doesn’t seem particularly interested in nostalgia for its own sake either, as it is more about what happens when a piece of popular culture becomes important enough to somebody that it starts to feel like part of who they are.

Most of us have probably had something like that at some point - a movie, a television show, a band, a fictional character, whatever it might be - that somehow seemed to understand us when the people around us didn’t, and that’s the part of Schoenbrun’s work I find much more interesting than simply calling the films “nostalgic horror”.

Camp Miasma shows a different side to the filmmaker

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma also shows a side of Schoenbrun that we hadn’t really seen in quite the same way before.

The earlier films can get pretty heavy, even when they are dealing with strange or surreal ideas, whereas Camp Miasma seems much more willing to have fun with itself - it knows it is making a slasher and seems perfectly happy to play around with everything that comes with that.

Schoenbrun has also talked about the film in interviews as being a more liberating experience, particularly when it comes to its sexuality and sense of freedom, and I think that makes the change in tone more interesting.

The sex isn’t just there to make the film feel more outrageous, because it also feels connected to the same ideas about identity and self-expression that has actually been running through Schoenbrun’s work all along if you look closely enough.

Even the casting of Gillian Anderson feels interesting for that reason. Anderson has spent decades being associated with genre television, most obviously through The X-Files, so she brings a whole history of genre fandom with her.

And I like that Camp Miasma doesn’t seem to be laughing at the genre from a distance either, as it can recognise how ridiculous some of these conventions are while still genuinely enjoying them, and there is a big difference between loving a genre and making a film that desperately wants everyone to know how clever it is for understanding that genre.

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 of course a film genre that is built around adolescence, sexuality, bodies and identity, among other things, while also being one of the most heavily rule driven forms of horror, 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.

And that's exactly the sort of thing Schoenbrun seems interested in - 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, because the problem with having a recognisable style is that eventually people start expecting you to make the same film again.

Once audiences know what they like about a filmmaker, they can become pretty resistant when that filmmaker decides to do something different, but Schoenbrun seems to be avoiding that problem by keeping the same interests while changing what they actually do with them, and as a movie watcher, I find that pretty exciting, because Schoenbrun's ambitions already seem bigger than horror anyway.

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 as well, 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.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma didn’t need to replace I Saw the TV Glow, and it didn’t need to prove that Schoenbrun could make the same kind of film again.

It just needed to be different.

And I think that’s exactly why I’m so interested in what Schoenbrun does next.

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