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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens in U.S. theaters today, and I have not seen it. Jack Haven found this very funny.
“Oh, I forget you haven’t seen it,” they said, barely six minutes into a call that was supposed to run fifteen and ran twenty-seven. “So you’re really asking blind.” Reader, I was. What follows is a conversation about a slasher villain conducted entirely on faith, with the person inside the mask, before anyone outside a festival could check my work.
Haven plays Little Death, the killer at the center of Jane Schoenbrun‘s film about a queer filmmaker hired to reboot a fictional slasher franchise. It is their second film with Schoenbrun after I Saw the TV Glow. Two films in a row, with more apparently wanted on both sides, so I started there.
Something Cosmic
“It’s definitely something cosmic,” Haven said. “I think that we satisfy something in each other.”
They described Schoenbrun as “one of these incredibly rare minds that just isn’t limited by any of the format or the oppressive nature of language,” someone who “uses language and uses our culture in order to travel. The partnership works because the two halves are not the same half. “We’re like a body mind pair. And I think we push each other to continue to expand in sort of opposite directions.”
The two roles could not be less alike. In TV Glow, Haven carried a character’s entire physical history in dialogue. In Miasma they carry it with a body and no lines at all. I asked which was harder and got an answer I did not expect.
“Definitely TV Glow,” they said. “Because it was this really tricky thing of having to provide the experience for the viewer of the physical history of a character.” Miasma, by contrast, “just had to sort of tromp through frame.” TV Glow took over a year to prepare. Miasma they “sort of fell into with a lot more joy.”
Then, unprompted: “I loved not speaking. I found that to be such a relief.”
A Michael Myers Terminator Mix
The walk came out of homework. Schoenbrun showed Haven a stack of Kate Bush music videos. Haven, on their own, went back through the Halloweens, the Friday the 13ths, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, hunting for what they called “the menu of movement when it comes to the slasher.”
Then they took the menu to the park.
“I made these videos with my friends in Fort Greene Park of sampling different walks,” Haven said. “And I think it ended up kind of being like a Michael Myers Terminator mix that Jane chose.”
Haven had also been studying kendo, and worked with the film’s stunt coordinator on spear work. The kills themselves were locked down tight, mapped out in advance by the stunt team. Haven is normally a throw-it-at-the-wall actor, someone who plans and then deliberately panics in the moment to see what falls out. This was the opposite. “This was very, very choreographed,” they said. “So it was almost like learning to dance.”
What Schoenbrun added, according to Haven, were the soft parts. “Jane played with it and added in these moments of tenderness. There’s the moment when Little Death looks up and you get to see his eyes. And that was the moment it was really important for Jane.”
The History of the Trans Monster
Horror’s record on trans villains is ugly and long, and I wanted to know whether that history sat on the production like a weight or like a permission slip.
“The film is about playing with the history of the trans monster,” they said. Schoenbrun wrote an introduction to the script that points at Carol J. Clover‘s Men, Women, and Chain Saws, and Haven ran with it.
Their reading of the slasher is the best thing anybody has said to me on the phone this year. The genre, as Haven describes it, is a machine that lets a mostly male audience do what they called “trans micro-dosing.” The viewer identifies through the film with a young woman “who often has a really boyish name and personality,” becomes her, then transcends her as her femininity takes over and they become the monster instead, and then they get to kill her.
“So the traditional format of the slasher film is one of moving through the gender spectrum,” Haven said. “And sort of killing the vulnerability, but then the vulnerability survives, and so you come out of a slasher film balanced almost.”
The villain, in this reading, is not the threat. The villain is the load-bearing wall.
“What the slasher villain plays with is our fear of the non-binary, in between, of the state of non-being, or between states of being that we can understand,” they said. “I think that this is the scariest thing for humanity because we organize ourselves in binary systems in every medium, really.” Miasma, and Schoenbrun’s work generally, is about “playing with that binary and mushing it up,” facing the fact that spectrums are spectrums and refuse to sit still in the shape we need them to hold.
Then Haven landed it. “The villain is actually sort of keeping that balance. The villain is almost like a self-sacrificing creature that is working to keep our illusions.”
I have written about that Clover book since college. Nobody has ever flipped it on me like that.
Many Bodies
Little Death is an icon of an invented franchise with decades of fake history behind it, which is a strange thing to be handed. Haven’s way in was a documentary.
“I watched this great documentary. Crystal Lake Memories,” they said. “And it’s so much fun to watch all of the characters who have played Jason Voorhees. And by characters, I mean the actors who have played Jason Voorhees, because you understand that Jason is this idea, this abstraction that is embodied by different personalities over his lifespan as a character.”
So Haven decided they were not the character. They were one of the tenants.
“I was not playing Little Death so much as Little Death was something that had existed through many bodies,” they said. The film shows Little Death in the original movie and in the present day, and Haven tried “to make my body as fluid as possible so that it could encompass the life of different actors, or different personalities, or different souls that had been Little Death.”
As for what is going on inside him: “Little Death himself to me is an abstraction. I don’t think that there’s any thought in Little Death’s mind. It’s just pure instinct.”
The Inevitability of Both Pleasure and Death
Which is a strange thing to hear about a killer whose name evokes la petite mort, the French euphemism for orgasm. I put it to Haven that the name promises joy and the performance is running on nothing but reflex.
“To me the film is about the inevitability of both pleasure and death,” they said. “And these are things that are really out of our control. When I watch the film, I feel a surrender afterwards. I feel a surrender into pleasure and a surrender into what all of us will face, which is death.”
They kept going, into what the phrase actually means. An orgasm as “a fraction or a mirror of what death will be.” The chemistry of dying as something they understand to be pleasurable. They pointed to some accounts from people revived after near-death events, who have described peace, warmth, or “this sort of warm new beginning feeling.”
“Religions fail, ideologies fail,” Haven said, “but that is something that is totally certain, totally natural, and in my mind something to sort of look forward to.”
Anything Found Without an Owner
Haven is in the middle of a scene that includes Louise Weard, the m sisters, and a lot of people making films for no money at speed. I asked whether it feels like a movement from the inside.
“It does feel like a movement, or like a rearranging of what’s possible,” they said. Weard got singled out as “the most daring of the new movement of cinema,” on the strength of how ruthlessly she works. Haven appeared in one scene of Castration Movie Part Two and got a single take for a dog cage torture sequence that “in most other atmospheres would have needed a hundred person crew and months of preparation.”
The economics are not an accident. Haven ran an art publication called Waif, and the name was the thesis.
“Waif means anything found without an owner,” they said. “In order to not be owned, which is in order to move more quickly than capitalism is able to censor you, you have to constantly be doing something new and you have to be doing it very quickly. And you have to be doing it very cheaply so that you’re not asking for a lot of money back.”
Even Schoenbrun, Haven noted, had to fight to finance Miasma after the success of TV Glow.
So I asked the obvious follow-up. Are we headed for a capitalism-will-sell-you-the-revolution scenario, where the machine works out that this material is profitable and starts producing it without understanding why it mattered?
“I think that that happened,” Haven said flatly. The fixation on identity got co-opted and sold back, and “so much of queer culture was sort of mutated into a gift shop.” What has changed, in their read, is the audience. “We’ve all become much more heightened critics. We’re able to understand really quickly if something is meant to be sold to us, if something feels soft on our body or soft on our minds or easily sellable, like a Wetzel’s Pretzel.” Something either lifts you or it does not. “You feel when things are a movement and then you feel when things are a sale.”
Where This Goes
I asked if Haven plans to be the scream queen of queer horror going forward or to head back to more typical work.
“I have no idea what’s happening in this, if you could call it an industry,” they said. “All of my beliefs about what this thing is have died over the past several years and have been reborn as, similar to Little Death, just kind of pure instinct.”
They are directing their third feature at the end of the summer, a comedy. They recently made Grind, Peter Collins Campbell’s darkly comedic thriller, playing a cis guy who delivers food on a bike in Manhattan. Haven called it an action movie. And there is one project they describe as an assignment rather than a plan.
“The big thing I want to do is make a tap dance musical called the Jalapeño Pauper,” they said. “It’s spelled P-A-U-P-E-R. And I am writing and directing and starring in that. That’s the one thing I know that I was sent here to make.”
As an actor, the goal is simpler. “I just want to continue to play in people’s minds, because I think that film as a medium, the way it makes the most sense to me, is that it’s just deep diving in the infinity of consciousness.”
Two Things to Watch
On the way out I asked for recommendations nobody has heard yet, and Haven gave me two.
The first is Divine Hammer, the debut feature from the m sisters, which won the audience award at TITE, the trans image and trans experience festival in Dublin. Haven was there in April. “One of the funniest movies I’ve seen, one of the most creative movies I’ve seen in a long time.”
The second is Jail Time Records, from directors Dione Roach and Steve Happi, a documentary about a recording studio inside a Cameroonian prison. “If you want to think about or understand the hunger and that movement of creativity, I think it’s a really great movie to watch. It’s a really joyful film and it’s really funny and it’s beautifully edited.”
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens in the United States today, August 7. I still have not seen it. By the time you read this I will have, and I suspect I am going to be thinking about the villain as a self-sacrificing creature keeping our illusions intact for a very long time.