Jane Schoenbrun: A24 passed on Camp Miasma, then it won the Queer Palm at Cannes

Jane Schoenbrun

Photo: PhilipRomanoPhoto / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 5, 1987 Queens, New York City
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	I Saw the TV Glow, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, We're All Going to the World's Fair
Awards	Queer Palm, Cannes Film Festival · Florida Film Critics Circle · Dorian · Fangoria Chainsaw

A24 made I Saw the TV Glow, watched it earn back roughly half of what it cost, and then passed on the film Jane Schoenbrun wanted to make next. That film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, found its money at Mubi, opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, left the Croisette with the Queer Palm and collected the strongest reviews of Schoenbrun’s career. A studio judged the audience too small; critics and a devoted following disagreed. Schoenbrun makes horror films about screens that swallow the people watching them, and about the trans viewers who recognised themselves in the static long before anyone else noticed.

Very little of it came from film school. Schoenbrun grew up in Ardsley, a suburb north of New York, though the birth certificate says Queens. They were a horror kid who spent a month of fifth grade working through the whole A Nightmare on Elm Street series. By thirteen they were living half online, on message boards devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files, writing fan fiction and inventing fake Buffy spoilers that travelled the internet as if they were real. Schoenbrun has tied those forums to feelings about their identity that they had no words for at the time. Every film since has gone back to them.

The formal training came later, and sideways. Schoenbrun, whose birthday falls on February 5, 1987, studied film at Boston University, graduating in 2009, and worked as a production assistant on short films by the Safdie brothers while still a student. Then came years on the plumbing side of American independent cinema: the Independent Filmmaker Project, essays for Filmmaker magazine between 2011 and 2019, a stint running film partnerships at Kickstarter. The first film of their own was a found object. A Self-Induced Hallucination, posted to Vimeo in 2018, was assembled entirely from Slender Man videos that strangers had uploaded to YouTube, a documentary about how an invented monster turns into shared lore. It stayed online for a few months, then vanished.

That subject returned as fiction in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which premiered at Sundance in 2021. Anna Cobb plays Casey, a teenager alone in an attic bedroom who films herself taking an online horror challenge and then records the changes she believes it is making to her body. Schoenbrun has said the film uses the language of cinema to describe the hard-to-name feeling of dysphoria. The director learned that about themselves mid-script: in April 2019, while writing it, they realised they were trans, and they came out after the shoot wrapped. Some critics fixed instead on the middle-aged man who watches Casey from his own screen and read the bond as predatory, a reading the film never confirms.

I Saw the TV Glow turned the subtext into architecture. Produced with Fruit Tree, the company of Emma Stone and Dave McCary, and released by A24 in May 2024, it follows two suburban teenagers, played by Justice Smith and Jack Haven, who bond over a late-night paranormal series and lose their footing in the world when it is cancelled. Schoenbrun began the script a couple of months into hormone therapy and calls it a film about the “egg crack”, the moment a trans person realises that the gender they were assigned does not fit. The coding is deliberate: nothing on screen spells it out for viewers who have not lived it.

That design has a price, and the career shows it. I Saw the TV Glow cost about ten million dollars and grossed around 5.4 million worldwide. It split critics as well: Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it got “stranded in a glum gaze”. Its standing grew afterwards, helped by Independent Spirit nominations for directing and screenplay, but the studio did not follow. Schoenbrun had already walked away from one project on their own terms. Attached to adapt Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, a cornerstone of trans fiction, they left over what they told The Cut were “creative differences with cis people”. The remark says plainly what the films only imply. Schoenbrun will not translate the work for whoever is paying for it.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma carries that refusal into the genre that, in Schoenbrun’s account, taught audiences to read transness as monstrous. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a queer director hired to reboot a dead slasher franchise, who becomes fixated on Billy, its original final girl, played by Gillian Anderson; Jack Haven returns under the mask of the franchise’s killer, Little Death. Schoenbrun has named Psycho, Sleepaway Camp and The Silence of the Lambs among the films it answers back to, and pitched the idea as Portrait of a Lady on Fire set inside a Friday the 13th sequel. Shot on 35mm in British Columbia and scored, like both earlier features, by Alex G, it is the funniest thing Schoenbrun has made and the frankest about sex after transition. Not everyone was converted. RogerEbert.com warned that some viewers would fault it for revisiting themes that I Saw the TV Glow handled better.

Most did not. After the Cannes premiere in May 2026, Mubi opened the film in American cinemas on August 7 and began streaming it on October 2, and it holds a 94 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek called Gillian Anderson’s performance sublime.

The next release is on paper. On October 27 Hogarth publishes Public Access Afterworld, Schoenbrun’s first novel, built around a secret broadcast network and a cast that runs from teenagers in 2009 to a trans content moderator working nights at a tech company. Schoenbrun presents it as the end point of the screen trilogy begun with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, and book events follow in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Schoenbrun, who is transfeminine and non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, splits their time between Brooklyn and Chatham, in upstate New York.

After that comes the biggest screen yet. Netflix has ordered Black Hole, a series adaptation of Charles Burns’s graphic novel about Seattle teenagers in the 1970s who mutate after catching a sexually transmitted infection, with Schoenbrun writing and directing and New Regency co-producing. By August they had finished two episodes and intended to write the whole season alone. “My biggest fear is that I end up making something that I’m not proud of,” they told Vulture. For a filmmaker whose work has always been aimed at a specific audience first, the question is whether that aim holds on a service built to be watched by everyone.

Featured Films

Tags: Gillian Anderson, Hannah Einbinder, Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I Saw the TV Glow, Jack Haven

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