Jane Schoenbrun

Jane Flannery Schoenbrun (/ˈʃoʊnbrən/;^[1] born February 5, 1987^[2]) is an American filmmaker. They^[a] worked as a producer before making their directorial debut in 2018.

Jane Flannery Schoenbrun^[3] born in Queens, New York, in 1987.^[4][5] They were raised in Ardsley, New York.^[6] They are the eldest of three siblings. They described their child self as creative and often macabre. One teacher had to write home and note that their drawings were "morbid." ^[7]

While growing up, Schoenbrun spent most of their youth immersed in film and television. They were a big fan of the horror genre. In 5th grade they spent a month watching the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series.^[7] Growing up, they worked at a local movie theater.^[8] Television served as a way to be emotionally attached to anything. Schoenbrun has mentioned being a fan of The Critic at only age 8 and looking forward to Saturday night Nickelodeon every week, which they described as an escape from everyday life.^[9] Media played an important role in their childhood. They have said that they were heavily invested emotionally in these fictional relationships more than in real relationships.^[10]

At the age of 13, Schoenbrun frequented online message boards, including forums dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and various bands. Fake spoilers they wrote for Buffy the Vampire Slayer would get spread around the internet as if they were authentic.^[10] They wrote fan fiction and spent a lot of time participating in online fan communities. Schoenbrun directly attributes this experience as informing the themes and content of their filmmaking.^[11]

Schoenbrun has described themselves as a trans and queer child who did not yet have the language to understand their identity while growing up.^[12] Growing up in a largely monocultural 1990s suburb, they found emotional safety mainly through television, movies, punk music, and online communities.^[12] During high school, they also attended DIY and basement Punk shows and made amateur horror films in the woods with friends.^[13]

They later graduated from Boston University in 2009, receiving a Bachelor's in Film.^[14]

While in college, Schoenbrun worked as a production assistant on short films by the Safdie brothers.^[14] After graduating, they moved back to New York and began working as a staffer for the Independent Filmmaker Project.^[14] From 2011 to 2019, they wrote a significant number of articles for Filmmaker magazine.^[15] In 2014, they served as the lead of film partnerships at Kickstarter.^[16]

In addition to their production work, Schoenbrun was a founding programmer of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation. They also contributed to the programming at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, as well as curating special screenings for other independent film organizations.^[17]

Schoenbrun made their directorial debut in 2018 with the documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination. The original upload of the documentary was on Vimeo on June 18, 2018.^[18] The documentary remained uploaded on the platform for several months, before ultimately being taken down for unknown reasons. The film centers the narrative of the fictional creepypasta and internet phenomenon Slender Man, being composed entirely of a compilation of found footage style community-made fan videos that existed on YouTube prior to the documentary's creation. Many of the videos found in the documentary were directly inspired by other Slender Man videos previously shown in the runtime, with the documentary demonstrating how user-generated videos can create interconnected online communities and shared lore.^[19] Schoenbrun has compared the film to a "work of theological inquiry".^[20] Schoenbrun has stated that they do not wish to profit from A Self-Induced Hallucination.^[11]

Their film We're All Going to the World's Fair premiered during the online 2021 Sundance Film Festival. The film follows the story of a teenage girl named Casey, portrayed by Anna Cobb, who joins an "occult online game",^[21] leading to Casey coming under the eye of JLB. JLB is a middle-aged man, who expresses the desire to protect Casey from the ill effects of the game. Critical reception of the film includes speculation on the nature of the relationship as predatory, however some critics note that nothing in the film explicitly supports this idea.^[19][22] The film was inspired by creepypasta aesthetics,^[22] similar to those found in A Self-Induced Hallucination. It is possible that We're All Going to the World's Fair was partially inspired by Schoenbrun's experience making A Self-Induced Hallucination, with Schoenbrun stating that they "fell down the rabbit hole", and were "fascinated by the agreed-upon premise [...] that contributors would never break character",^[20] an idea that is directly reflected in We're All Going to the World's Fair. In an interview, Schoenbrun shares personal stories of their own life that are similar to plot points within We're All Going to the World's Fair.^[14] Schoenbrun has stated that We're All Going to the World's Fair attempts to "use the language of cinema to articulate the hard-to-describe feeling of dysphoria",^[22] through its "dissociative", "haunting" in-universe videos of participants of the World's Fair challenge experiencing unusual symptoms such as their body turning to plastic, finding arcade game tickets under their skin, or growing angel wings.^[22] The film shares themes with A Self-Induced Hallucination and I Saw The TV Glow, such as trans community formation through shared interests in (horror) media,^[19][23] "self-annihilation" through media,^[23] or the blurring of reality and media.^[22][23][24] Critics noted that it paid homage to low-budget horror films such as Paranormal Activity.^[25] The majority of We're All Going to the World's Fair consists of original footage, with the exception of some online videos posted by content creators previously unrelated to the film.^[14]

On October 7, 2021, Deadline reported that Schoenbrun's next feature, I Saw the TV Glow, was in development. The film would be co-produced by Fruit Tree, the production banner of actress Emma Stone, as well as A24, which would also distribute the film.^[26] Starring Justice Smith and Jack Haven,^[b] I Saw the TV Glow follows two teenage outcasts who bond over their shared love for a paranormal television series, only for them to lose touch with reality upon the show's cancellation.^[27] Schoenbrun has described a recurring childhood dream involving "the field behind the field" near their high school that served as a visual and thematic influence on the film's atmosphere and tone.^[28]

Schoenbrun began writing the script for this film while they were about two months into hormone replacement therapy. They have stated that they view Justice Smith and Jack Haven's characters as being different sides of themself during the transition process.^[29] The film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival before screening at the Berlin International Film Festival and the South by Southwest Film Festival.^[30][31][32] I Saw the TV Glow was released in select theaters on May 3, 2024, before a wide release on May 17.^[33] The film was "hailed as an acutely intense psychodrama of self discovery".^[8]

In January 2023, The Film Stage announced that Schoenbrun was set to direct an adaptation of Imogen Binnie's 2013 novel Nevada, which is widely considered a classic of transgender literature.^[34] However, Schoenbrun confirmed in a May 2024 interview with The Cut that they had exited the project due to "creative differences with cis people".^[6] In a June 2024 profile that appeared in the New Yorker, Schoenbrun revealed that their next film would be a slasher called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. According to Schoenbrun, the film will follow a queer director who, while shooting a new installment of a popular horror franchise, becomes obsessed with the process of casting the movie's "final girl" character.^[4]

Schoenbrun is also currently working on a trilogy of novels called Public Access Afterworld, which will be published by Penguin Random House's imprint Hogarth Books.^[35] The novels are reportedly a combination of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and coming-of-age literature. According to Schoenbrun, Public Access Afterworld will serve as the conclusion to a thematically-linked trilogy of works that includes We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Schoenbrun described the books as "my Dune. It's my epic and me trying to do Buffy, Lost, or Harry Potter. I've created this huge mythology about a giant cast of characters with a story that spans centuries and sprawls across alternate universes. It's got a scope that a 90-minute film couldn't hold, and it's about transition, becoming, and truly closing that gap between self and screen until you feel like you're approximating some form of real life."^[36] The project was initially pitched as a television show.^[37]

On May 9, 2025, Schoenbrun's next film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, was announced. Schoenbrun has stated that it will be a slasher film and their "best attempt at the 'sleepover classic.'"^[38] The film is produced by Mubi and Plan B Entertainment. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are attached to star in the film.^[38] On June 17, 2025, Schoenbrun announced on Twitter that the filming for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has finished.^[39]

On October 23, 2025, Deadline reported that Netflix ordered a straight-to-series adaptation of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, with Schoenbrun writing and directing. New Regency will serve as the co-studio alongside Netflix. Executive producers on the series include Plan B, Erin Levy, Charles Burns, Yariv Milchan, Arnon Milchan, Natalie Lehmann, and Laura Delahaye. Set in the 1970s, the novel follows teenagers in Seattle who contract a mysterious sexually transmitted disease known as "the Bug", which causes them to develop bizarre physical mutations.^[40]

Schoenbrun's work frequently explores themes of dysphoria, mediated identity, and blurring the line between reality and fantasy. They have described these frequent themes as central to their art, often drawing from experience they encountered in online spaces and from unarticulated feelings regarding their queer identity that they did not have the words for at the time.^[41][10]

Schoenbrun has discussed how these internet communities such as message board culture and early creepypasta, is what helped inform their thematic approach to A Self Induced Hallucination and later projects. Specifically their interest in participatory digital storytelling and boundaries between online identity and fantasy.^[42][7]

Gender identity and dysphoria are prominent themes in Schoenbrun's work.^[43] They have frequently described I Saw the TV Glow as a film about the "egg crack", a term for the moment in a trans person's life when they realize their identity does not correspond to their assigned gender.^[44][45][46] Schoenbrun and critics alike have written of how the representations of trans characters and trans-adjacent characters within their filmography are for trans people, and are coded in ways that do not make it explicit for audiences who are unfamiliar with transness or are not trans themselves.^[22][24] Schoenbrun has described the presence of screens, which are frequently featured in their work, as "a metaphor for the ways in which we don't experience ourselves when we're going through dysphoria and coming to terms with transness".^[47] Critics have compared Schoenbrun's work to that of David Cronenberg and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, with connections having been made between Cronenberg's work and the film's portrayals of interfacing between the human body and technology. Contrastingly, Kurosawa's Pulse depiction of the mind-body internet invading the real world is somewhat oppositional to Schoenbrun's conceptualization of the user-driven internet.^[22]

Schoenbrun is transfeminine and non-binary.^[48][43] They said in a May 2024 Vanity Fair interview, "I don't think my relationship to gender is something that I completely understand. It's actually quite comforting to embrace incoherence."^[48] They discovered they were trans while tripping on mushrooms in April 2019, during the process of writing We're All Going to the World's Fair.^[14][48] They subsequently came out after the project wrapped in 2020; one of Schoenbrun's long-term partners, who was the first person to suggest they were trans, is thanked in the credits of the film.^[48]

Schoenbrun has described their gender and queer identity as something they were unable to fully understand to an extent while growing up, looking back at moments of not being "in the right body" and the inability to articulate their queerness as child and teenager. They have talked about how media, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other television programs at the time served as an emotional outlet where they found their identity when it was unavailable in their suburban environment.^[41][49]

Schoenbrun married Melissa Ader in 2014.^[4] The two met as teenagers in high school where they grew close during long conversations on adjacent treadmills. They described their relationship as "serious homebodies" and have been together for more than eighteen years.^[50]

Schoenbrun has expressed their love for the film scene in Boston, where they lived during their years at Boston University. They recall skipping classes and attending midnight screenings at the Coolidge Corner Theatre with friends. They have described these experiences as some of their happiest early adulthood memories.^[51]

With the exception of their mother, they are estranged from their immediate family.^[46] They are polyamorous,^[48] with three partners,^[52] and they also identify as an anti-capitalist^[4] and have spoken out against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians,^[53] including as a member of "Filmworkers for Palestine."^[54] As of 2024, they maintain residences in Brooklyn and Chatham, New York.^[4]

Miscellaneous

Producer and/or writer only

• Jane Schoenbrun at IMDb 
• Jane Schoenbrun at Rotten Tomatoes