How DP Eric K. Yue transformed Jane Schoenbrun's 'Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma' into a blood-soaked '80s slasher tribute about forbidden desire in KODAK 35mm

Director Jane Schoenbrun (We're All Going to the World's Fair, I Saw the TV Glow) continues their trans odyssey with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: a kitschy yet romantic slasher film tribute about a blood-soaked world of fear and desire.

Queer director Kris (Hannah Einbinder) wants to reboot the Camp Miasma horror franchise from the '80s and '90s and tracks down the original film's "final girl" for research. But she instantly falls for Billy (Gillian Anderson), the eccentric, Norma Desmond-like recluse living on the abandoned campground movie set in the Pacific Northwest. Their sublime connection leads to an emotional and sexual awakening for Kris.

Cinematographer Eric K. Yue (I Saw the TV Glow) returns to shoot in 35mm, which seemed like a natural progression of Schoenbrun's philosophy about how movies define our reality and keep us vicariously stimulated. "After we shot [TV Glow], I thought this was a bit more restrained when I read the script," Yue suggests. "I think when you spend so much time with these ideas, they sort of become normal. And then when the trailer came out, everyone thought this looks so crazy. Really?"

Yet while prepping Camp Miasma for the Vancouver shoot, Yue realized that it was more complex visually, especially with its two different looks. There's the vintage summer camp movie-within-the-movie slasher stylization (heavy film grain, crash zooms, and handheld POV stalking shots), along with the surreal Sunset Blvd.-inspired romance between Kris and Billy, set in the cozy winter confines of Billy's dreamlike world (super saturated colors, fake snow, and hand-painted matte backdrops).

For Camp Miasma, Yue selected KODAK VISION3 500T 5219 and shot on the Arricam LT with Zeiss Super Speed lenses that were rehoused by Gecko Cam. He also used standard speed vintage glass: the Angenieux HR Zoom and Cooke 18-100mm Varotal Zoom.

"Shooting all on one stock just made it easier when budget's a concern," Yue explains. "You don't shoot as much daylight stock for interiors, and you're not using all of your short ends from the daylight stock. I wanted to use every bit of film possible. We also wanted this film to be a lot grainier than TV Glow, and Jane wanted to be a lot looser in terms of camera work. It's a lot more dialogue heavy and Jane was working with performances in new ways. I was excited to do 10 takes. So I was able to push the stock a lot more one stop and underexpose it in 500T."

The director and cinematographer once again worked with colorist Mikey Rossiter (TV Glow) to create the degraded '80s slasher look. "I used some heavy diffusion filters like Black Pro-Mist 1 for the '80s section to add a bit of haze and lower contrast," Yue explains. "In post, we also considered re-printing the film to 16mm to achieve a different look, but Mikey started to show us some 16mm print emulations in Resolve. Jane and I were excited by this, and Jane encouraged him to go further and further. What came out of that is more of the mind’s eye of an ‘80s horror look. Jane liked the idea of using this degradation as a subjective tool, changing the amount of grain and texture as it relates to memory, changing from scene to scene."

The mind's eye motif actually begins with Kris, who grows up watching the franchise at home, with the camera distorting her perspective through a kind of out-of-body experience. 

"This is part of Jane's visual language of how media or fiction shape us and expose us to things before our identities are formed," Yue says. "We experience at a young age fears and desires that we don't understand, and how they're embedded in the memory, and that's visually articulated here."

Later, when Kris and Billy watch a print of Camp Miasma at her home, this hallucinatory experience recurs again. It's heightened during the bravura musical centerpiece, which is set to the Counting Crows' "A Long December." The ghost killer, Little Death (TV Glow's Jack Haven), goes on a vengeful rampage with a tipped spear, wearing a metal helmet shaped like a ceiling vent and a white vinyl suit. The sequence is stitched together as a oner from his POV, with numerous decapitations and blood spurting out like fountains.

Yet it contains a different look from the rest of the period slasher film. "When we got to that really long one-shot musical sequence, it switches into a cleaner, low-budget Michael Bay-like visual language," Yue reveals. "Jane didn't want this section to feel too cheesy but more modern. Even the gore effects, which are goofy, look more like 2000s CGI. It's Kris experiencing the film now through a different view."

The elaborate shot list was worked out between Schoenbrun and Yue off and on for many weeks, where the director described what they saw in their head as they planned the story beats and time marks and went through the song.

"For this, I drew storyboards and Jane either approves them or there's another shot where I add in what else we might need for the sequence." recalls Yue. "That became the document for the first meetings with visual effects and special effects. And then I wrote down things that are not possible because every kill can't be done in a real one take. You'd have hidden cuts, and I wrote a mark where the hidden cut would be and then we'd do location scouting.

"And then it just snowballs and evolves and now we have real locations," he continues. "So the lake might be in a different location than where the cabins are because that's not actually how close they are, and we know we're going to shoot this Little Death coming out of the water, and then this section, and then there's going to be another hidden cut somewhere. And then we're going to a different location. So there's a map that gets drawn out, and then we start to do little [rough previs] on my iPhone, where we have the song playing. And then we do the thing: eleven shots and four deaths."

But there's more. Little Death continues his onslaught in a cabin. That's where Billy's character loses her virginity (highlighted by a split diopter shot with foreground and background faces in sharp focus). However, this sequence is a true oner, with Haven running around as Little Death, carrying a 40ish-pound Arriflex 235 camera on a Snorricam rig strapped to his back.

"We spooled down to 200-foot rolls for that camera," Yue says. "At first, I thought maybe we need to do this digitally. I was just worried about the weight of the camera. But it was just light enough. Jack had to do this really physical take over and over and over again. It's a reverse sort of POV [filming himself]. But I'm glad we got to do it all on film."

Meanwhile, part of the reason they shot in Vancouver was to create a beautiful winter wonderland for Kris and Billy. Schoenbrun and Yue achieved this through artificial staging, lighting, and emotional intensity.

"Jane said so much of this film is about these looks between [Kris and Billy]," Yue explains. "Very cozy with artificial-like backdrops. And then have these extreme close-ups. So Jane wanted to do handcrafted backdrops where you actually paint canvas first. And the idea was brought up about glass matte paintings, and Jane was really into the idea of doing that.

 "For the love scene, the power goes out and so it has to be lit by fire," he adds. "And one of the films we watched was Portrait of a Lady on Fire, where it's pre-electricity. And so a lot of it was candlelight and fire.

"And then the [Kentucky Fried Chicken] dinner scene I always thought should look like a Douglas Sirk melodrama," Yue continues. "One of my favorite things is seeing that red lipstick on Gillian pop and her hair and stuff like that. It really does look like those old '50s melodramas."

The search for the hyper-expressive look of the snow outside led them to the Japanese ghost anthology Kwaidan, while the color was inspired by the Donkey Kong video game. "We wanted a fluffy, magical-like texture, and we liked the shade of blue on one of the levels," he says.

The ending, though, was one of the most challenging scenes to film. Einbinder and Anderson lay on top of each other covered in fake blood, and Einbinder additionally had a blood-rig in her mouth that was very uncomfortable.

"The scene was also an intense performance in addition to the technical components, but [Hannah] was so incredible in her patience and temperament through all of it," Yue remembers. "It was really a collaboration between every department, and Jane really held Gillian and Hannah to make sure that they felt both protected and cared for through this process.

"We filmed with two cameras, one profile shot and one overhead close-up shot to maximize the coverage," he adds. "The scene was really about Kris' face in a long, unbroken shot, finally reaching ecstasy. Jane didn't want to highlight 'the penetrative act' of [Little Death's] spear for this climax, so we didn't even film it hitting the floor as the original film had done."

Overall, Yue believes they made a film that's beautiful, bold, and singular. "It is a tender film about forbidden desires," Yue suggests, "but also an '80s slasher film in one, which is incredibly unique. I admire Jane’s ability to explore themselves deeply and truthfully as an artist — they ask their collaborators to come along on their journey, encouraging everyone to play and bring their own ideas. Shooting on 35mm gave me a canvas to bring Jane’s vision to life, allowing the grain and materiality of the medium to express the story that we wanted to tell."