Hannah Einbinder may be finding herself typecast in an unexpected niche.
After wrapping five seasons of Hacks — with her Ava Daniels navigating the many highs and lows of working with and befriending Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance — Einbinder is now starring in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and once again navigating a complicated relationship with an older woman.
The film, from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, follows a queer director (Einbinder) tasked with making a slasher franchise sequel, who becomes obsessed with casting the original film’s “final girl” (played by Gillian Anderson) in her project. When they meet, however, both women are thrown into psychological and sexual chaos.
“There’s a Sabrina Carpenter lyric [in her song “Manchild”] like ‘I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them.’ People just come to me and I happen to respond to it,” Einbinder joked with The Hollywood Reporter of the trend in her recent projects. “I love it, I’m all for it.”
Einbinder said she looked to the “psychosexual canon” of Secretary, The Duke of Burgundy and David Cronenberg’s Crash for inspiration in playing her and Anderson’s relationship, while Anderson had to go through an education in final girls — a trope in horror movies for the last surviving female character who confronts the killer.
“I had kind of sworn off horror films because of a bad trip watching one when I was very young, so I didn’t even really understand about final girls and the cultural importance of final girls,” the actress explained. “It wasn’t until I started having conversations with Jane and understanding what they represented on so many different levels, and also what Jane was trying to do in their new representation of a final girl. It kind of blew my mind, and I felt terrible for closing my mind off so much to that genre — I’m interested in revisiting it again with a new perspective, but I’m also terrified.”
Camp Miasma is Schoenbrun’s third feature, following We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. The name of the movie popped into their head one day and they built the story around it, saying, “I think I knew I wanted to make a movie about coming into my own sexually and in my body after transition, that’s kind of what I was going through in my life at the time.”
“I wanted to make something that was really truthful to that experience and all of the gory messiness in that same way that TV Glow and World’s Fair were truthful to other parts of my personal experience,” they continued. “I thought ‘teenage’ because I felt like a teenager; I was 35 but I was experiencing what people call second puberty and it felt like, ‘Oh, this is what everyone’s been on about.’”
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens in theaters Aug. 7.
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