Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma begins with the confident sleight of hand of a film that wants us to believe an entire cultural phenomenon has somehow escaped our memory. Through VHS sleeves, newspaper clippings, trading cards, toys, an arcade game and increasingly desperate sequels, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun constructs the history of Camp Miasma, a fictional 1980s slasher franchise whose masked murderer, Little Death, became both an icon and an embarrassment. The character’s head resembles a square ventilation grille, while their weapon is a grotesquely oversized double-ended spear. Once feared by teenagers, Little Death was eventually sent to Manhattan, outer space and even the graveyard of forgotten intellectual property. In a few exhilarating minutes, Jane Schoenbrun captures the complete commercial life cycle of a horror franchise: surprise success, merchandising frenzy, artistic exhaustion, critical reassessment, online controversy and inevitable resurrection. The joke is affectionate rather than condescending. These films may be tacky, politically troubling and artistically uneven, but they can still become intimate landmarks for the people who discover them at precisely the right—or wrong—moment.

That person is Kris, played with nervous wit and concealed vulnerability by Hannah Einbinder. Following the modest success of an independent film described as Psycho from the shower curtain’s perspective, Kris is recruited to direct the fifteenth Camp Miasma entry. The studio sees a convenient bargain: a fashionable queer filmmaker can revive a dormant brand while protecting it from criticism of the original’s transphobic mythology. Kris understands the cynicism perfectly, yet accepts because Camp Miasma has occupied her imagination since childhood. Hoping to anchor the reboot, she travels to the remote Pacific Northwest in search of Billy Presley, the original film’s final girl and the source of Kris’s earliest sexual awakening. Billy, portrayed by Gillian Anderson, has withdrawn to the abandoned summer camp where the movie was shot, turning the location into a private kingdom of old film reels, paintings, weed, fried chicken and memories that may not remain safely confined to the screen. Snowbound cabins and conspicuously artificial landscapes give the place the atmosphere of a forgotten studio backlot dreaming that it is real.

From Billy’s grand entrance, Gillian Anderson embraces theatrical excess without allowing the performance to become an empty impersonation. With a honeyed Southern drawl, extravagant poise and the faded glamour of Sunset Boulevard, Billy initially appears to be another Norma Desmond waiting for an audience. Yet the longer Kris stays, the more melancholy, sensuality and calculation emerge beneath the act. Her invitation to share fried chicken and an improbable selection of dipping sauces becomes simultaneously comic, seductive and vaguely threatening. Hannah Einbinder provides the ideal counterweight: Kris can discuss split-diopter shots, genre history and queer film theory with breathless authority, but becomes almost paralysed when asked to speak honestly about herself. Their conversations gradually turn the film into an unusual two-hander in which an artist approaches a former idol expecting professional inspiration and instead encounters a disquieting reflection of her own repressed desires. The chemistry between the performers sustains scenes built from pauses, glances and lines that hover somewhere between confession and performance.

The film’s richest tension lies in the disagreement between the two women over what Camp Miasma means. Kris instinctively intellectualises its imagery, identifying misogyny, transphobia and the violence hidden inside familiar slasher conventions. Billy reduces the matter to “flesh and fluids.” Neither interpretation is entirely wrong. Jane Schoenbrun understands that problematic art can retain a private emotional power that responsible criticism cannot simply erase. A film encountered too young may frighten, excite or awaken something before the viewer has acquired the language to explain it. Kris’s obsession with the young Billy, played with fragile intensity by Amanda Fix, is therefore more than fandom: she recognises in the actor’s nervous gaze a distance from her own body that resembles her experience of sex. The masked Little Death, brought to life by Jack Haven, becomes victim, monster, voyeur and camera at once. Even the killer’s name invokes “la petite mort,” collapsing orgasm and death into the same violent surrender of consciousness.

Visually, this is Jane Schoenbrun at their most playful. Working with cinematographer Eric K. Yue, the filmmaker abandons conventional realism for matte-painted horizons, miniature-like buildings, saturated candy colours and fountains of blood so excessive that murder becomes ecstatic choreography. The extended recreation of the original Camp Miasma is not merely a parody of Friday the 13th or Sleepaway Camp; it feels like a damaged memory of such films, reconstructed from faded prints, illicit childhood viewings and decades of desire. A rampage scored to A Long December by Adam Duritz and Counting Crows is absurd, melancholy and strangely euphoric, while supporting appearances from Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Aren Buchholz add flashes of comic texture. Junk food also becomes part of the visual language: gummies, fried chicken and brightly coloured wrappers embody the forbidden pleasure of consuming something supposedly bad for us, whether that indulgence is sugar, sex or disreputable cinema.

The film occasionally suffers from its determination to explain and complicate itself simultaneously. Some dialogue feels deliberately stiff, the middle section lingers longer than necessary, and the final movement risks becoming so sweet and metaphysical that its emotional logic grows hazy. Viewers expecting a conventional slasher may also be surprised by how rarely the film attempts to frighten them. Yet these imperfections feel connected to Kris herself: verbose, self-conscious, unable to experience anything without immediately analysing it. When Hannah Einbinder is finally held in an extended close-up and Kris’s irony falls away, the intellectual machinery suddenly reveals the lonely person it has been protecting. It is the film’s most affecting moment, proving that its torrents of blood, comic digressions and cinematic references have always been leading toward a simple but difficult act allowing someone to inhabit her own body without apology.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is consequently less a deconstruction of the slasher than a passionate argument for the strange uses audiences make of art. Jane Schoenbrun does not excuse the genre’s cruelties, nor suggest that critique is unnecessary; instead, they ask whether analysis alone can account for the images that formed our desires before we understood them. The result is funny, erotic, tender and proudly artificial, a romance between two women as well as a love letter to the disreputable films that provide lonely viewers with secret languages. Not every layer fits neatly, but neatness would betray a movie devoted to messy appetites and identities. This is cinema as a portal through which the watcher can become the watched, the victim can seize the killer’s gaze, and resurrection can require the symbolic death of an older self. For all its theoretical density, its final invitation is refreshingly physical: stop apologising for what moved you, leave the safety of interpretation and feel something.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
Produced by Not publicly announced
Starring Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Fix, Arthur Conti, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry
Cinematography: Eric K. Yue
Edited by Graham Mason
Music by Alex G
Production companies: Plan B Entertainment, Fruit Tree; complete company credits not publicly announced
Distributed by MUBI (United States)
Release dates: August 7, 2026 (United States)
Running time: 112 minutes

Seen on 11 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre