Camp Miasma Ranks Blood on Schoenbrun's 'Monster Scale'
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- Jane Schoenbrun wrote and directed "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma," their third feature — an erotic slasher that uses horror language to explore gender dysphoria and coming home to pleasure in one's own body.
- Schoenbrun rates each gore effect on a "monster scale" from 1 (shitty) to 10 (awesome) — a framework they first used on "I Saw the TV Glow" — then deliberately varies "Camp Miasma's" blood quality scene by scene to control how safe the audience feels.
- The film opens with what Schoenbrun called an "oil well-style geyser of blood," signaling "excess and campiness" and serving as a "mission statement" breaking free from expectations set by their prior filmography.
- Special effects supervisor Kyle Moore, billed as British Columbia's "snow guru," also handled the film's summer-for-winter shoots alongside its blood work.
- The halfway killing spree is shot like a "Michael Bay horror music video" with slick, contemporary gore, then immediately followed by a scene intentionally "mis-shot to be colored wrong" — Schoenbrun said they kept asking for "shittier and shittier blood" until a character's mouth blood looked like "pink yogurt."
- Schoenbrun told IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast that they constantly call attention to the artifice "because if every moment is artifice, it kind of puts you in this space of being shocked when something real emerges."
- The cast includes Jack Haven as Little Death/monster, Hannah Einbinder as filmmaker Chris, and Gillian Anderson as former Final Girl Billie; the film is now in theaters.
Why it matters: Schoenbrun's "monster scale" reframes practical-effects work as a directorial instrument: when blood looks shoddy, the audience can lean back and absorb harder material about gender and embodiment. For horror used as a vehicle for trans-affirming storytelling, that's a craft precedent — not just a thematic claim, but a tested method for letting viewers modulate their own emotional distance.
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