Jane Schoenbrun Says ‘Teenage Sex and Death’ Is ‘About as Commercial as I Can Do’

The first film to make some real noise at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” brought thrills, chills, and sapphic slasher vibes to the Théâtre Debussy on Wednesday night. But earlier that day, director Jane Schoenbrun and their cast members Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson came by the American Pavilion presented by IndieWire for a lively (and live!) chat about the new film.

“When you guys watch it, you tell me, but I think it’s about as commercial as I can do, which is maybe not commercial,” the “I Saw the TV Glow” and “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” director told the crowd. The film stars Hannah Einbinder as queer horror filmmaker Kris, who’s been hired to reboot a popular (but problematic) ’80s slasher film franchise, and she wants the original film’s final girl, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), to star in it. But their meeting takes on a psychosexual twist as Billy starts to open up Kris’ world in ways the 29-year-old director couldn’t have anticipated. MUBI ultimately took on the film where other distributors passed.

“Beyond my wildest dreams, [‘I Saw the TV Glow’] had this cultural impact, and it was crazy to be sort of greeted one after another with this kind of shrugging, shirking indifference,” Schoenbrun, who is trans nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, said. “A bunch of folks said, ‘Slasher films aren’t commercial.’ I was like, ‘That’s how you know that’s transphobia.’ I see the fucking shit you guys are making three times a year, and they’re slasher movies, you know? I don’t think there was a conspiracy. … People choosing what movies get made have the taste of what they’re excited to see, and the people who choose what movies get made… don’t have the same gaze that interests me.”

“It’s a really special film,” Anderson added. “I think the audience will get that from the second it starts. It’s hilarious, and it’s important, and it’s profound.”

As the film is not only about queer sexual awakening, it’s also an allegory for Schoenbrun’s own evolving relationship to sex after coming out as trans in 2020 alongside the release of their Sundance breakout feature, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.”

In terms of the film’s “elevator pitch,” Schoenbrun said, “It’s a fucked-up elevator ride,” laughing. “They’re pressing that door open. They’re pressing the one with the triangles pointing that way, they’re like, ‘Let me out of here.’ It’s funny when you’re me, and you pitch a movie, you typically have to say something like, ‘I have a very sad life story.’ … My first two movies came out of a very specific moment in my life that was amazing in the sense that I was becoming myself, but if you’ve seen those movies, you know they were pretty intense moments. The early stages of figuring out that you’re trans and telling everyone in your life, and taking that step off the diving board and plunging into unknown waters. It was the same thing as getting on an SSRI, which is that you get all the bad side effects first.”

But this movie is about “coming into one’s own body, one’s own identity, one’s own sexuality, for me, for the first time in my life at age 34 … the movie is about teenage things. The movie is about stuff that most people figure out about themselves when they’re 15 or 16, because I didn’t get a first puberty that made sense. What else can I tell you? Yeah, it’s a movie about sex.”

Einbinder, in her first leading film role and now amid the final season of “Hacks” on HBO Max, said she “went to the Jane Schoenbrun Film Institute for Girls” to watch films that set the tone for “Teenage Sex and Death.” Not just slasher movies, either. “Some real pervert shit,” Schoenbrun added.

Anderson is well-acquainted with the macabre thanks to her beloved, long-running role on television’s “The X-Files,” but she’s not necessarily a stereotypical horror consumer herself.

“When I was a young teen, one of the first times I smoked weed, I was at somebody else’s house, and they started watching ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ And I had one of the worst first trips of my entire life, and that really dictated my relationship with horror — and weed, as a matter of fact,” Anderson said. “I didn’t have a big horror education, and it still triggers me a little bit. … Slasher and horror and anything ‘Saw’-like or real psychological thriller stuff, I can’t go there. But I’m happy to play somebody who embraces it and leans into that level of fear around it. … It’s been a fun journey with my relationship with dark shit.”

While this is Schoenbrun’s first time at Cannes as a director, they were previously at the festival in a different capacity, and in a totally different mindset, a decade ago. “Um, I used to be a boy,” they said, “and I used to have a shitty job that I didn’t like. I used to come to Cannes with that job, and I was at Cannes when I decided to quit my job. I was like, ‘I’m depressed at Cannes.’ That was exactly 10 years ago, and now I’m not depressed at Cannes.”

Anderson, too, has never been at the festival for a movie before. “But when we wrapped the movie, I remember the last thing you said to everyone,” Schoenbrun told Anderson. “You said, ‘See everyone at Cannes.'”

“Did I say that?” Anderson said. “I made it happen. Yeah. That was me.”

MUBI releases “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” theatrically starting Friday, August 7.