“Sex seems so easy for so many people,” a young filmmaker tells her new lover, laying half-naked in a pool of discarded sweet wrappers. “But I’ve never been able to get there with someone else unless I’m really far away in my head.”
This is one of many moments in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s delirious dissection of slasher movies, that captures its absurd yet intimate magic — but also one that serves as a core reminder for viewers: To reach this movie’s orgasmic plane, you too must learn to let go.
The story begins with Kris (Hannah Einbinder), an up-and-coming queer director who, after catching the attention of indie studios with her first feature (“Psycho — but told from the perspective of the shower curtain”), has been tasked with reviving an old summer camp slasher series called Camp Miasma.
Camp Miasma’s lore is richly drawn — as shown in a spectacular opening sequence that only the mind of someone raised by scuzzy VHS tapes and their underground fandoms could conjure.
Inspired by the likes of Friday the 13th, The Burning and — most prominently — Sleepaway Camp, the fictional franchise stars a masked serial killer known as Little Death (Jack Haven), who rises from a lake to enact vengeance on groups of mean, horny teens after being drowned for being raised as both a boy and a girl.
In 2026, this gender-bending origin story has become “problematic”, but all the more ripe for a progressive, ‘elevated horror’ reboot — externalised metaphors for generational trauma, anyone?
But Kris, who had her sexual awakening while watching the first movie, has other ideas. She wants to sign on its original final girl — a turban-wearing recluse named Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), whose thick southern drawl and Norma Desmond demeanor seem to ooze through the screen like sweet, sticky honey.
Billy still lives on the grounds of the original camp, and as Kris enters, the world as she knew it collapses into a libidinous lucid dream; a dissociative space caught between media and reality, where scenery becomes painted backdrops, and a casual fried chicken dinner becomes a sensuous montage of smacking lips and dipping sauce.
Schoenbrun has a unique aptitude for this. Their previous two movies within the Screen Trilogy (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow) similarly allegorised pop culture, media and digital communities as transformational spaces — world’s within a world that reflect our true selves back, like a psychological mirror.
Another recent horror, Backrooms, also did this well. But while the liminal spaces of that movie became metaphors for negative thought patterns, Camp Miasma‘s meanings aren’t so easy to condense.
This is perhaps the whole point. While the genre’s tropes — including its misogyny and transphobia — are represented with a meticulous layering of potential theories, Schoenbrun ultimately favours feelings over analysis.
As Kris struggles throughout to balance her deep connection to Camp Miasma with the shame she feels about its more harmful elements, Billy reminds her: “It wasn’t about cultural depictions of monstrosity or gender trouble or any of that stuff. It was about two very simple things — flesh and fluids.”
Within the margins of their two opinions, a more complicated truth exists that can’t easily be intellectualised. Billy and Kris’s relationship becomes the example of this — not just a love story, but a swirling, hallucinogenic embrace of animalistic urges and their contradictions.
In another particularly tense scene, in which it’s implied that Billy was sexually assaulted as a teenager, the mood suddenly switches, melting into a montage of Little Death committing a violent massacre — heads and torsos speared with comic amounts of blood splatter — to the soundtrack of Counting Crows’ ‘A Long December’.
As the camera pulls back, we catch a glimpse of their eyes through a slit in their TV-like helmet, the absurdity of it all letting slip something human again.
While sometimes “what the hell?” inducing, these tonal and stylistic whiplashes are never jarring. Instead, they coalesce into a singular vision that feels at once so deeply personal to the director, yet recognisable — like staring into the windows of a stranger’s house and seeing your own objects inside.
“I liked the danger and powerlessness,” Billy tells Kris, sharing what lures her to horror. “It’s giving in.”
In the same way, Camp Miasma is a film that urges you to give in. To run through the woods with it, bloodied and braless — because Little Death is coming, and what else is a Final Girl to do?
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is out at select European cinemas now, with a staggered release across the rest of the continent throughout September.