For Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma cinematographer Eric Yue, shooting Jane Schoenbrun’s queer meta slasher on digital cameras was never considered an option.

“Shooting on 35mm wasn’t even a question,” he told Phantasmag’s Molly Page at the special screening of the film at NYC’s The Metrograph. “We did I Saw the TV Glow on 35mm, and Jane wanted this one to feel dirtier and messier. So it’s a dark film. It’s very muddy and grainy. You can emulate that on digital, but we had to go with the real thing.”

The winner of this year’s Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma follows a young queer filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder) tasked with rebooting the once-great Camp Miasma slasher franchise, who becomes obsessed with casting the original film’s final girl (Gillian Anderson). Marking Schoenbrun’s third feature and second collaboration with Yue as DP, the indie film was shot on Vancouver Island in the summer of 2025, and Yue suggested that shooting on film helped keep the crew focused on set.

“There’s a lot of care that goes into [shooting on film]. Every single take, everyone's so much more dialled in, and you're not just rolling for the sake of it. A filmmaker like Jane really respects the medium, too, and understands you have to shoot with intention.”

As Einbinder and Anderson’s characters gradually fall in love at the summer camp where the original movie was filmed, a major sequence sees the pair watch a print of Camp Miasma. For Yue, that meant creating a visual language both for the larger-than-life “real world” and the film-within-a-film. “The main reference we watched was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” he revealed. “But really, what we tried to do is the mind's eye of what an 80s slasher film looks like. When Hannah [Einbinder] falls down the hill, we shot through foggy woods, and we used blue gels on lights that are more from that time period. Then in post-production, Mikey Rossiter, the colourist, helped give it this lived-in feel as well.”

Praising his director, Yue also expressed how Schoenbrun’s openness to more complex techniques, like the old school trick of using matte paintings as in-camera backdrops, excites him as a collaborator. “Jane has such an imagination and is also totally fearless, and that is a gift for someone like me. I love problem-solving, and even the matte backdrops — I think any other director might say, ‘Oh, that's too hard.’”

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing nationwide in US and UK cinemas.