REVIEW

‘TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA’ A Deeply Meta Exploration of Queerness in Slashers

By Matt Oakes · August 4, 2026

We open behind the scenes. A lingering first-person POV lumbers forward, breathing heavily. Then a murder from 100 yards away. Blood fountains like struck oil. Jane Schoenbrun’s disorientation is established within 60 seconds. Then clarity. Camp Miasma is a horror mainstay with a small army of VHS sequels, a riff on ’80s slashers like Friday the 13th, complete with its own franchise iconography and spinoff board game. The reviews are bad, then get worse. Think pieces conjure Sleepaway Camp’s infamous final reveal. Box-office receipts sputter and collapse. Now a reboot from a promising Sundance director is in the works. So begins Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Hannah Einbinder is that filmmaker, Kris, a queer Sundance darling hired to revive the long-running Camp Miasma franchise for a new generation. She arrives at the summer camp where the original movies were filmed, determined to convince Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive final girl from the first installment, to return. Kris wants to “explore the intersection between queerness and monstrosity,” using a major studio reboot as an unwitting engine to make something real, personal, and good. Billy, however, has spent decades living in the shadow of the role that made her famous, and their collaboration quickly becomes more intimate, obsessive, and psychosexually charged than either the studio or Kris likely anticipated. What begins as an attempt to resurrect zombie IP with a filmmaker’s edge gradually becomes a descent into the mythology surrounding the original film and the damage – and awakenings – left in its wake.

Schoenbrun initially frames that descent through the language of cheapo ’80s slashers, riffing on the crummy special effects, heightened artificiality, and knowingly bargain-bin aesthetics of the era. Cinematographer Eric Yue shoots on crackly 35mm, giving the movie the texture of something unearthed from the back shelf of a video store. But one expecting a filmmaker to up their game with each subsequent feature may find that’s not the case here. And while I understand the attempt to recreate the feeling of a forgotten midnight-movie oddity, some of the craft here is undeniably lacking – as if presenting itself an excuse to not be passable as good.

The meta commentary can also become too much to the point of exhaustion. Characters say things like, “I think there’s about to be a jump scare,” while the foley artists go absolutely feral – like when Kris and Billyeats a certifiable grease feast of Kentucky Fried Chicken (or really whenever any scene requires sound effects at all.) Everything is heightened to absurdity and played for comedy, but the joke does not always deepen much beyond announcing itself as a joke. Schoenbrun has described the film as “an attempt at a cozy, deranged sleepover classic”, though I found the experience increasingly more alienating than inviting.

Gillian Anderson plays Billy as a faded Southern belle, all coiled charm, buried resentment, and theatrical languor. “If it gets too real, you can always turn it off,” she tells Kris, a line echoing the logline of the film she starred in many years ago – a piece of campy horror wisdom that gradually becomes something closer to a invitation to tune out. Billy is not simply the former face of a dead franchise. She has been preserved by it – or perhaps communed with it – trapped inside its mythology even as audiences, critics, and studio executives moved on.

Einbinder brings a recognizable mix of queer awkwardness, self-conscious ambition, and nervous intellectualism to Kris. As a filmmaker, she is fluent in the language of representation and artistic reclamation, but far less prepared for the emotional and bodily realities she hopes to excavate. Einbinder and Anderson are both good, and neither is really the problem. They make for an intriguing pairing, particularly as admiration gives way to fixation, but I was never entirely convinced by either performance. Some of that may be intentional, since Schoenbrun favors a heightened, anti-naturalistic register, but the emotional distance remains. I at once digested the psychosexual pull developing between them without ever fully feeling consumed by it.

The killer at the center of the Camp Miasma films is an undying entity called Little Death, a lumbering figure with a boxy head resembling an old television or a sunken speaker cabinet. The name is no accident. “La petite mort” is the French euphemism for orgasm, and Schoenbrun repeatedly links sexual release with violence, surrender, and a temporary escape from the body. The movie interrogates the pressure surrounding virginity, the desire to shed oneself, and the strange way sex can be imagined as both transformation and annihilation. Little Death does not merely murder. It represents the terror and seduction of becoming someone else, vis à vis the baptism of sexual congress.

Much like I Saw the TV Glow, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma leans heavily on the movie-within-a-movie structure. Extended passages from the original Camp Miasma play out as Kris and Billy watch, revisit, and comment on them, with the fictional slasher gradually bleeding into the reality surrounding it. Schoenbrun has always been interested in the porous border between media and identity, in the way images leak through the scene to become totemic, larger than life. Here, that boundary becomes increasingly unstable as the Camp Miasma movies stop feeling like old artifacts and begin interacting with the reality of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The soundtrack adds to that destabilizing effect through a series of eclectic, often jarringly sincere needle drops. Counting Crows’ “A Long December” plays over an extended, gore-soaked mass murder sequence. Sometimes that tonal mismatch is weirdly inspired and joyous. At other points, it feels like one more layer of irony piled onto a movie already in danger of collapsing beneath its temple of self-awareness.

I find Schoenbrun’s movies challenging in a way that keeps me wondering where they are going and whether the destination will justify the journey. With I Saw the TV Glow, it wasn’t until the closing moments that its awkward performances, obscure plotting, and curious pacing finally snapped into place. Camp Miasma moves in the opposite direction. As it pivots away from the charged two-hander between Kris and Billy and back toward studio notes, production meetings, and the movie within the movie, reality and unreality begin folding together so aggressively that the emotional logic gets lost. Characters arrive at major shifts as though crucial scenes have gone missing, while the comic undercurrent too often diffuses the commentary rather than sharpening it. I understand that I’m not the most direct target for all of Schoenbrun’s subtext around transformation, autonomy, and escaping the body, but I was still left increasingly flummoxed rather than drawn deeper in.

There’s still something potent in the film’s connection between sex and death, surrender and escape. Losing your virginity – onscreen or otherwise – becomes less an anticipated milestone than a portal, with murder and orgasm operating as twin forms of release. Einbinder and Anderson are both good, and the movie remains formally curious, deeply queer, and aggressively self-aware. But where I Saw the TV Glow eventually transformed its alienation into something piercing and impossible to look away from, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma leaves you stranded inside its maze. I can see the intersections it wants to explore but never felt things lock together into anything emotionally satisfying or cathartic.

CONCLUSION: ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is a deeply meta horror curio whose commentary on the genre and the place of queerness within it eventually overwhelms its plot, stakes, and emotional logic. A challenging proposition, particularly for viewers seeking something a little more digestible.