Proceed with caution: light spoilers ahead.
It’s a known paradox that, despite its spotty history with sexualized violence and negative stereotypes, horror has long been a favorite genre among queer audiences. Now, a new generation of genre-literate horror lovers has emerged online, hungry for films that subvert, mutate, and reclaim the canon’s tropes. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s new metatextual take on the summer camp slasher, is the next addition to horror’s queer contingent. What else would you expect from a film starring intergenerational sapphic icons Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder?
In the I Saw the TV Glow director’s third feature film, Einbinder stars as Kris, a young filmmaker attempting to revamp a languishing ’80s slasher franchise that also happened to serve as her sexual awakening. It’s at the film’s titular summer camp that she encounters the franchise’s original final girl, Billy (Anderson), and finds herself encased in a phantasmagoric succession of bloody killings and sensual entropy stemming from the camp itself.
Anderson is no stranger to sexual rousings: The actor’s roles in The X Files and, later, Sex Education were the catalyst for many a woman’s gay awakening (including Jane Lynch’s), and her bestselling book, Want (and it’s sequel More, out this September), compiles almost 200 candid, anonymous accounts of female sexual desire. What Anderson did for pantsuit lesbians in the ’90s, Einbinder has done for bisexuals donning Carhartt jackets in the 2020s, thanks to her turn as the witty poly comedian Ava Daniels on Hacks. In her first feature role, Einbinder finds more space for sensitivity and vulnerability, even when she’s racing through the forest half-naked.
Anderson and Einbinder sat down with CULTURED ahead of the film’s release on Aug. 7 to talk Secretary, their horror movie Mount Rushmore, and how they unwind after ingesting mouthfuls of blood.
Hannah Einbinder: Sorry, let me put in my headphones. Someone’s taking a shower. My ADHD. I’m like, “Ah.”
Gillian Anderson: Is that a sign of ADHD? Not being able to turn noises off?
Einbinder: Yes, it’s a neurodivergent thing. Have you been really deep in the press too?
Anderson: I have not been because I start rehearsals for a play [Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?] beginning in August. I took two weeks off of family time. So I’ve actually been completely not doing anything because I’ve been with the kids. It’s been intense.
Einbinder: How has it felt to get that vacation time? Are you able to really succumb to it? Do you enjoy it?
Anderson: I think that I suddenly realized that my system, which is so used to doing so many things at once, almost completely slowed down to barely a heartbeat. I’m used to constantly having a different kind of input that is about decision-making and isn’t just all about dealing with 2-year-olds screaming at the top of their lungs and pooping constantly and all of those other areas of familyhood and patience that are needed. So it’s been odd. It hasn’t really been a holiday.
Einbinder: Do you have a place that you go to really actually completely unplug?
Anderson: The irony is that I normally go to the place that I was, but I normally don’t go with little ones.
Einbinder: Is that the island?
Anderson: Yeah.
Einbinder: Near where we shot the film. That’s such a serene, incredible environment. I felt a little bit connected to it because when we were at Fantasia Fest in Montreal, there was a storm in New York and all of our flights got canceled, and Jane had driven from where they live Upstate to Montreal, and they were riding back. I was like, “Can I hitch a ride with you?” And then we did a little road trip back to the States.
I was driving through Upstate New York, and it’s so wooded and foresty, and I was just like, “Oh my God, it feels like we’re back in Vancouver, on the island a little bit.” Obvious point incoming, but there’s just something about nature that puts me at complete ease and total ecstasy.
Anderson: It’s very different. I’ve found lately the places that I want are where there is no other sound. Often in New York, even sometimes Upstate, but all over LA, there’s always a leaf blower somewhere, or there’s construction of some kind, so to be in places where it’s literally no sound but the sound of birds and dragonflies—it’s really something. It almost feels like an endangered species, a lack of sound pollution.
Einbinder: It’s honestly probably something that we share, feeling highly acute sensory sensitivity. That’s probably what put me personally so at ease in the context of shooting the film because I would wake up on a fricking river every morning and just have tea outside.
Anderson: Have you sat and watched the film again with audiences?
Einbinder: I’ve sat in San Francisco and watched the whole movie.
Anderson: Oh, that must have been great.
Einbinder: It was so great. They were so warm. And I just notice different things every single time I watch it.
What was one of the more involved, intensive, or challenging scenes to film?
Einbinder: Probably the death in the end. There was just a lot of technicality…
Anderson: A little bit of drowning.
Einbinder: Yeah.
Anderson: A little bit of waterboarding.
Einbinder: My mouth was flooding with blood, and I was—talk about sensory issues—covered in sticky blood in a wet bed filling up with water. That’s my own personal nightmare. It was so challenging… but also one of the most rewarding. That was a credit to feeling completely taken care of.
You would think that it was some of the sex scenes, but I think we, again, just had such extensive, clear communication about what they needed to be and how it needed to be done and why we were doing it the way we were that just felt easier.
What did the bonding, the conversations, the prep actually look like? How were you building that rapport with each other?
Anderson: There was an intimacy coordinator. We had a couple of days of rehearsal at the beginning before we started shooting, and it was huge empty room except for our table and a little table of very strange snacks. Mini hot dogs and stuff.
And then on the day, the set would be cleared, and we’d get to talk through it first. I can’t remember how far we’d gotten, whether we had actually started filming yet or whether it was just the rehearsing, but all of a sudden, Jane said, “This is the first sex scene I’ve ever done.” It was almost like a confession. There are things about the process that are unique to those scenes because it does, by its nature, need to be so technical.
They always feel like that, I think, almost for everybody because they end up being so counterintuitive. It’s: “At this moment I’m going to put my hand here, and then I’m gonna turn my head this way, and then you’re going to reach around.” I realized too in working with Jane and Eric [Yue], our DP, they’d mapped it out and thought every millisecond out to such a degree that in their minds, or at least in Jane’s mind, there were a couple times where I thought it’s already been shot. Like it already exists because they’ve thought about it so many times.
There was one particular scene where everything had been setting up for a while. It was quite detailed. I think it might have even been our fried chicken scene, and we hadn’t even rehearsed it once, and Jane said, “Okay, should we shoot?” I suddenly realized that it’s so thought through. It already lives out there somewhere, so surely it must be easy to just push the button and for everybody to hit their mark and do what they need to do because I’ve thought about it so many times.
They were trying to recreate a camera move that takes place during a scene in the remake of Psycho, and, you can imagine for anybody who knows what they’re trying to do, how delicious that moment would be. There were so many treats for a discerning or for a particular type of audience.
In the more recent half of your career, you’ve worked on these books where women talk about their own experiences with sex and sexuality. Were you drawing from any of that when it came to your performance?
Anderson: It all started because of the character I played in Sex Education, just in terms of being a part of that bigger conversation and playing a character who was so comfortable with that aspect of themselves, but also the language that she used and how nonjudgmental she was about pretty much anything. I wouldn’t have done the books had it not been for that.
It made sense to me when Jane came to me for Billy based on so much of what the film is about. It feels almost like I get the casting, which is an odd thing to say, but I understand the added little bits that they get for free with me.
What are some of the horror movies in your Mount Rushmore?
Einbinder: I was very much a horror person before shooting this film, but I think that I had a little bit of a blind spot around the slasher subgenre. How many guys are on Mount Rushmore? Four? And no women. Wow, America. Classic. I think I would put Silent Hill there. I would put Housebound, which is a comedic horror film. I would put Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I think I would put The Exorcist.
Frankly, for me, so much of the filmic influences of the performance were not necessarily horror. That was the background research that I would do for my character. But for my performance in the film, it was more within the psychosexual genre: Secretary, The Duke of Burgundy, Crash, Bound, Persona. Just films that depicted the exploration of kink or the exploration of sexuality in a way that felt unconventional because I think that’s the main thing here.
There are a couple pieces of Kris’s wardrobe that are inspired directly by Lee Holloway, who is the protagonist played by Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary: those long skirts and Mary Janes and the socks, covering up what lies beneath this, like, sexual deviant. There’s a little Easter egg that I put in the movie where Kris has a little battle ax tattoo here, which is a reference to Gina Gershon’s battle ax tattoo in Bound. It’s a smaller version tucked away on my inner arm. You can see it mostly during the second sex scene. I really think that film has such an influence on the characters and on the movie itself.
Any for you, Gillian?
Anderson: No. I had a bad experience early on in my early teens smoking some bad weed while watching a horror film. That really influenced my avoidance of them from that point forward.
Einbinder: Miasma’s the second horror movie she’s ever seen.
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