E arlier this year, Jane Schoenbrun met with the estate of late horror icon Wes Craven, to pitch a reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street . It was, on paper, a perfect marriage of author and subject. Schoenbrun, the buzzy 39-year-old filmmaker behind the modern trans classic I Saw the TV Glow , knows the genre inside and out: their savvy handling of horror nostalgia was on full show in this year’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma , which cast Gillian Anderson as the reclusive star of an Eighties slasher. Schoenbrun knows every crack in Elm Street’s pavement.

“But they didn’t choose me,” Schoenbrun says, “which is fine. I kind of saw that coming. I mostly just talked about hauntology, the concept popularised by [the late cultural theorist] Mark Fisher.” (I Google “hauntology” after our interview.…