Jane Schoenbrun’s Queer, Erotic Reinvention of the Slasher
Director Jane Schoenbrun discusses their latest feature film, a slasher homage that integrates queer theory and gender analysis into the genre’s transgressive framework. Drawing intellectual lineage from Carol J. Clover’s foundational 1992 study Men, Women and Chain Saws and Linda Williams’s technical film analysis, Schoenbrun examines how slasher cinema operates as a site of unstable gender identification. The film, starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, reimagines horror through post-Butlerian lens, interrogating the ‘hermaphroditic gaze’ that Clover identified but left theoretically underdeveloped. Schoenbrun’s work situates genre cinema as both visceral experience and rigorous symbolic apparatus, collapsing distinctions between intellectual rigor and affective engagement with lowbrow aesthetic forms.
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