Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's new horror-comedy Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma pays loving, obsessive tribute to the slasher genre while telling a personal story about childhood fandom for entertainment never meant for young eyes. The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer director hired to reboot a Friday the 13th-style camp franchise, who is pulled into a fantasy while visiting the original film's reclusive "final girl," Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson). Schoenbrun, who has said they know slasher films "so, so deeply," uses the fictional Camp Miasma franchise to explore the intense emotional pull such films had on them as a child, echoing themes from their previous film, I Saw the TV Glow.

To achieve the desired dreamlike, immersive look, production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland revived matte painting, a largely lost pre-CGI technique in which artists paint backdrops onto glass, leaving gaps for actors to appear to walk through the scene. With no living practitioners to consult, the team pieced the method together from old film books and blogs; fine artist Joel Rodriguez created five such paintings for the film, drawing comparisons to classics like Metropolis and Hitchcock's The Birds. Schoenbrun was reportedly so pleased with the results that more matte-painting footage was added than originally planned.