Audiences at Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar screening the opening night film last week, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, saw red — as in fake Hollywood blood, and according to its stars, "It was a lot!”
“That blood day,” as bisexual icon Gillian Anderson described it to Variety, “was pretty serious," she said. "Just remembering the amount of liquid and how to not drown while shooting the scene."
Wait, what? Drown? Well, after all, this is a horror movie by none other than out filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, the transgender nonbinary transfeminine director of the psychological film favorites, I Saw the TV Glow and We're All Going to the World's Fair.
Variety's Alex Ritman summarized Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma this way: a "wild, hilarious and emotional psychosexual exploration of horror, fandom, identity, pleasure, trauma and awakening, the apex of a rousing crescendo of sublime, almost-magical delirium." Oh, and then he added: "And yes, there’s a whole lot of blood."
Anderson, who also called the movie "a wild ride," confessed she had a “panic attack” when she finally saw one particular scene for the first time — no spoilers here! But that hardly compares to what out bi actor Hannah Einbinder said she endured.
“We shot a lot of very intense stuff and I had to really put myself in the fear and approach it incredibly seriously,” the Emmy award-winning co-star of Hacks told Variety. “I was having trouble just regulating my energy.”
“Hannah literally went to that place of terror — 100% — and you can absolutely see it, it translates," said Anderson. "As somebody who was observing, it was intense, admirable and terrifying.”
As Out reported just about a year ago, this film is a movie within a movie, and is centered on a make-believe slasher franchise from the 1980s called "Camp Miasma," which is being rebooted.
Schoenbrun cast Einbinder as Kris, a "woke" queer director of indie films making a name for themselves in the industry, who is trying to resurrect the franchise after too many sequels and spin-offs. Kris hopes to tone down the transphobia of the originals, or as she says, “paper over the ugliness.”
Her idea for the reboot is to cast Billy, played with a generous Southern accent by Anderson, who was the franchise’s “final girl." But when Kris finds her living at the same lakeside camp where the original film was shot, she discovers Billy is now a weed-smoking shut-in, a modern-day Norma Desmond.
And all that blood aside, Einbinder said she actually found the experience of filming this movie "almost therapeutic."
“I felt really challenged by the material," she told Variety. "I think this liberation from shame and embracing desire was something was something that, in reading the film, I had to reflect on that myself on a personal level."
Ultimately, she summed this film up as a "trans sapphic ode to marginalized communities.” It's her first feature film, just as Hacks was her first television show.
Fans of erotica will be satisfied as well. One scene involves fried chicken and dipping sauce that sends Einbinder and Anderson's characters to another plane, albeit it also, not surprisingly, also involves blood.
“They are pleasure seekers and something like a dipping sauce becomes so ultra-sensual,” said Einbinder. Schoenbrun has been quoted as saying this is her first film inspired by her own experience with sex post-transition. That informs Kris's battle with her own sexual awakening, something that she must address before she can, “completely give over to desire,” Einbinder said.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is produced by Plan B and distributed by Mubi and Madman Films.
Avan Jogia and Dove Cameron.Prime Video