Jane Schoenbrun makes movies for the weirdos for whom movies are realer than real life. In their films, old films and TV shows are portals to another world, vehicles of escape for characters whose own lives are weighted down by alienation and dysphoria. In 2024’s extraordinarily haunting I Saw the TV Glow, two such characters find solace in a ’90s TV show called The Pink Opaque, whose nightmarish visions, filmed with campy zeal by Schoenbrun, cross over and become realer than the empty contours of their unfulfilled lives.

The filmmaker is deeply attuned to the way pop-culture obsessions can both alleviate and intensify loneliness. It almost feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy; you can easily imagine Schoenbrun’s own films, beginning with 2022’s eerie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, serving this role, being treasured and passed around by alienated youth the way previous generations latched onto Donnie Darko or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Loneliness seeps through the pores of Schoenbrun’s cinema, but so does the possibility of queer connection and self-actualization.

With the twistedly erotic Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun puts another retro-cultural fixation through the funhouse mirror — this time, ’90s slasher movies — and affirms their status as one of the most distinctive American filmmakers of their generation. It’s a fiercely imaginative trip of a film, one that pays homage to an eclectic array of influences — the reclusive Hollywood-in-exile madness of Sunset Boulevard, the blood-drenched gore of Carrie, the trans-panic slasher-horror of Sleepaway Camp (and, previously, Psycho), the dreamlike mystery realm of Mulholland Drive — but still feels like a singular statement that could only have come from Schoenbrun’s brain.

Though not a trilogy in the conventional sense, their three films loosely follow a linear progression of queer awakening. In World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, we get visions of isolated adolescence and stunted young adulthood, respectively. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma depicts a character on the other side of that anguished search for self, in her late 20s and established in her career, yet still struggling with intimacy and dissociation. Naturally, this being a Schoenbrun joint, she submerges herself in pop-cultural detritus, namely, horror movies.

It doesn’t take a shrink to sense some parallels between that protagonist, Kris, a burgeoning director of some arthouse renown (her previous film is described as “Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain”), and Schoenbrun themself. Like Schoenbrun, Kris, played with a nervy, self-deprecating wit by Hacks it-girl Hannah Einbinder, is a horror connoisseur; in an early scene, she watches an old slasher film on a dilapidated hotel DVD player and scribbles “DESIRE” in her notebook.

Kris has been assigned to reboot a problematic ’90s slasher franchise called Camp Miasma, but she doesn’t want to make “a remake of a remake of a remake.” Eager to revitalize the stale franchise, she hatches an idea to cast the actress from the original film, Billy Presley — then an up-and-coming scream queen, now a stoned recluse living alone on the actual property where Camp Miasma was shot.

Kris visits the mysterious and alluring Billy (Gillian Anderson, a vision of frozen-in-time glamour) at her isolated hideaway in deep winter, and Billy treats her to fried chicken, probing questions, and a private screening of her 35mm print of Camp Miasma. “I bought myself a private alternate universe,” Billy drawls, describing the sprawling property, which may or may not be haunted by “Little Death,” the spear-wielding ghost who slaughters counselors in the fictitious franchise.

An unusual camaraderie develops between the two women and their shared fixation on the past, then a psychosexual entanglement. Though the sex sequences are haunting and intense, some of the most erotic passages are those in which Kris and Billy simply sit in the dark, viewing the original Camp Miasma, the flickering of the vintage print dancing across Billy’s enraptured face.

Structurally, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is shaggier and messier than I Saw the TV Glow. The third act flirts a little too much with the dreaded horror-comedy genre, and scenes in which Kris Zooms with studio execs from afar carry a too-obvious satirical tone that momentarily breaks the spell of psychosexual reverie. Yet, in all its narrative twists and metatextual flourishes, it remains a remarkably imaginative exploration of sex, death, and slasher pastiche.

The premise works, in part, because Schoenbrun pours so much detail and lore into making the Camp Miasma franchise seem real. The elegiac opening credits, set to a moody cover of R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” capture the franchise’s long-faded popularity with a nostalgic glow: The camera lingers on old Miasma VHS tapes, movie posters, even newspaper clippings and board games. Later, Schoenbrun gives us sepia-toned film-within-a-film sequences, which uncannily parody the genre’s hammy dialogue, semi-predatory sexuality, and goofy gore. These sequences intrude on Kris’s subconscious; during sex, she admits, she imagines herself transforming, becoming a character in the film who falls prey to “Little Death” (yes, like the French term for orgasm).

During a Q&A that followed my screening, Schoenbrun quipped that the movie is “structured to have queer sex with you — which means that before anything happens, we’re gonna talk a lot.” It drew a big laugh, but the filmmaker wasn’t really joking. The film, they explained, was a means of addressing “the mystery of exploring my body and my sexuality post-transition.” Perhaps no other director would use a movie about slicing and dicing camp counselors to process their own sex life. But the personal dimension brings a sincerity that balances out Camp Miasma‘s parodic winks.

Like many queer kids born into the Reagan Eighties, Schoenbrun holds an obvious affection for David Lynch. I Saw the TV Glow struck me as Lynchian not just because of its overt homage to the Twin Peaks Roadhouse, but also because the film burrowed into the quiet malevolence lurking beneath ’90s nostalgia as keenly as Blue Velvet corrupted the kitschy touchstones of Lynch’s youth.

But the Lynch film most strongly evoked by Camp Miasma, with its hallucinatory Hollywood satire, sapphic interludes and erotic charge, is Mulholland Drive. Here, as in Lynch’s masterpiece, reality and fantasy bend into one as the film nears its bloodbath climax, and I mean climax in more ways than one. The screenplay follows its own circuitous dream logic, which makes repeat viewings appealing and perhaps even compulsory.

Like Lynch, Schoenbrun uses filmmaking as a means of burrowing into forbidden corners of their subconscious. And they’ve found an audience eager to come along for the ride.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (★★★★☆) is Rated R and is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens in the Washington, D.C. area on Aug. 14, and fully nationwide on Aug. 21. Visit fandango.com.