Crafting the best American movie of the year thus far with I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun has enjoyed success form their mesmerizing odyssey of identity and the festering horrors of nostalgia. With A24’s release recently crossing the $4 million mark at the domestic box office, Schoenbrun has now finally revealed details on their follow-up project.
Speaking to the New Yorker in a fantastic profile, they reveal the film is titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a funny and grisly story about “a queer filmmaker hired to direct a new installment of a long-running slasher franchise. The director fixates on the prospect of casting the ‘final girl’ from the original movie, and the two women descend into a frenzy of psychosexual mania.”
“My next movie is all about sex––essentially a movie about learning to enjoy sex after transition. Pre-transition, it wasn’t that I was asexual––I had plenty of desire––but having good sex in the wrong body was impossible. What was available was full dissociation, which is obviously a theme in the first two films,” Schoenbrun also recently told Filmmaker Magazine.
Working with Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave producer Jeremy Kleiner, the film will “both honor and critique” the “gender deviance” connected with killers of the genre, from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs, exploring how films “created and codified an idea of transness as monstrous.”
Schoenbrun also plans to release their first book Public Access Afterworld, from Hogarth Books, noting in a statement: “All of my work so far has been leading up to this. Public Access Afterworld is the culmination of my so-called ‘screen trilogy’ that I began with World’s Fair and TV Glow.’ But unlike those works, which focused mainly on pre-transition, this novel is an epic of trans becoming, and probably the biggest cinematic universe I’ll ever create, my attempt to craft a contemporary queer opus on the scale of Sandman, Lord of the Rings, or even, groan, Harry Potter.”
Here’s a description of the book: “An epic blend of literary fantasy, coming-of-age, sci fi, and horror, Public Access Afterworld traces the mysterious transmissions of a secret television network known as Public Access Afterworld that draws in a wide cast of characters, from two teenage best friends in a suburban New York basement to a housewife during the last days of World War II to a young trans content moderator at a YouTube-like corporation, who becomes an unlikely hero capable of rescuing a century of victims disappeared into the broadcast’s signal. Public Access Afterworld is a thrilling and profound novel of identity, conspiracy, the secret occult history of American entertainment, and the narratives that guide our lives and shape our world.
“I feel so creatively stockpiled right now,” Schoenbrun added. “I fantasize about having a novel and a movie a year.” One project they won’t be tackling, however, is an adaptation of Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada. “I quit Nevada due to creative differences with cis people,” the director tells The Cut. “And I’m bummed, but I love that novel and love Imogen. I was so excited to make a restrained Kelly Reichardt–style walk-and-talk movie. I do have other dream adaptations. I’m doing one that I’m not allowed to talk about yet.”
For more, read my interview with Schoenbrun here and check out their Criterion closet picks below.