Then they sat down with the director in order to figure out what items they actually needed to tell this story. “We locked ourselves in a room with Jane and the cinematographer and mapped out the sequence beat by beat, and every beat was an object we needed to fabricate,” explains Brandon Tonner-Connolly, the film’s other production designer.

Image: MubiMost of the items only appear on screen for a brief moment, but the work that went into them was extensive regardless. The Camp Miasma board game, for instance, is fully playable, with a complete set of instructions.

Even something seemingly simple, like VHS boxes or movie posters, took a lot of effort: The team had to not only determine how they should look, but also make sure to include information like the production and distribution companies and the film’s tagline. “You can’t make decisions based on screentime,” says Hyl and.

“If it’s a board game, we’re making a board game, even if it’s on camera for half a second. That’s a resource challenge.

It’s part of our process to assign priorities to things. But the truth is that Jane is so full of ideas and very excited, and gets us very excited, so that unlike other movies, this felt like a pencils-down moment.

We just wanted to keep making stuff and coming up with ideas, and we only stopped because the camera was ready and we simply ran out of time.” Image: MubiThe attention to detail was also in part a nod to fans.

“Jane has such an incredible following that you know that people will pause the movie and read the review, or read the instructions for the board game,” adds Tonner-Connolly. That meant ensuring everything was consistent; the team made multiple tie-in lunch boxes, for instance, and made sure the designs were different to reflect if they would’ve been released in 1983 versus 1997.

Nailing the details was important, but the duo also say that their goal wasn’t to 100 percent re-create existing designs and slap the Camp Miasma name on them. Instead, the objects “needed to look and feel like the memory of watching” those movies.

According to Tonner-Connolly, it’s the same approach that was used on I Saw the TV Glow, which similarly had a story revolving around a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style ’90s drama. “We know that we’re technically proficient enough to exactly replicate these [classic slasher movies], but what we’re actually interested in is relying on these fragmented memories of childhood, and how things are remembered and misremembered,” he explains.

“We wanted to play with those emotions and create this new thing.” It’s that combination of detail and emotional resonance that allows the film to tell Camp Miasma’s multi-decade history with just a handful of snapshots.

And that helps make everything in the rest of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — which includes a long sequence pulled straight out of the film that started it all — feel grounded in something that seems real before taking more fantastical turns. “It’s hard to convince an audience that for the last 30 years this thing has been in the cultural conversation,” says Hyl and.

“People can smell a phony pretty quickly.” Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in theaters on August 7th.

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