A slasher flick that doubles as sex therapy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gleefully complicates a dynamic that has governed the horror genre for generations. If, in the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th, titillation and puritanism went hand in hand—so that sex, especially as experienced by horny teenagers, was gruesomely punished—Camp Miasma sees the slasher itself as a perverse pathway toward sexual satisfaction. With the exciting verve of a filmmaker fully coming into their unique powers, the movie provokes audiences into asking the sort of questions about fear and desire that Jason Voorhees couldn’t imagine.
As writer and director, Jane Schoenbrun builds on their proposition that pop culture—music, TV, the movies—is more than an omnipresent part of modern life. It is life. That distinction was harrowingly blurred by the teen protagonist of Schoenbrun’s debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, as she gave herself over to an online horror game. Something comparable happened in I Saw the TV Glow, where a pair of unlikely friends bonded over a cut-rate sci-fi TV series until it swallowed them whole. Similarly steeped in pop culture, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma focuses on a rising film director, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), who has been hired to reboot the moribund Camp Miasma slasher series, which goes back to the 1980s. Kris thinks she has a handle on the handle the series has on her: “My work explores the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” she confidently proclaims. But while visiting the remote estate of Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive star of the original Camp Miasma film, Kris begins to realize that her relationship to slashers, cinema, and sex is much more complicated.
For horror fans, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma offers a cornucopia of sly references, reconsiderations, and playful imaginations. Over the opening credits—set to a gorgeous Okay Kaya cover of R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” which infuses the proceedings with an undercurrent of vulnerability—the movie succinctly traces the life cycle of a legacy horror property like Camp Miasma, from the mania of the first few films (there is a Miasma 3D installment) to the dregs of the desperate down years to the “elevated” turn that the studio hopes Kris will take the franchise. The kill scenes throughout Teenage Sex and Death are ludicrously gory, in keeping with the largely cheeky tone of the movie. You’ll likely never think of Counting Crows’ “A Long December” the same after its employment during one grisly sequence. (The fact that I never think of “A Long December” is part of the brilliance of the choice, which juxtaposes the song’s banality with the scene’s lunacy.) Aside from the real-life horror classics already mentioned, there are also nods to A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining, Videodrome, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit. (I’m sure there are others I missed; does Sunset Boulevard count as horror?) None of these are lazy or intrusive; they’re simply in the movie’s blood.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma establishes a layered, meta, self-referentiality with its ingenious opening sequence: a single take in which the camera moves through the outdoor set of the the original Camp Miasma, from the POV of the actor playing the movie’s killer. After a production assistant walks up to the camera and adjusts the actor’s mask, we cut to a dramatization of the Camp Miasma scene: a luridly lit nighttime field (cinematographer Eric Yue returns from I Saw the TV Glow), where a couple encounter said killer, resulting in ridiculous, spurting geysers.
Later, Schoenbrun stages a sequence that melds the “reality” of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma with the original Camp Miasma. The moment begins with another scene from 1983’s Camp Miasma, depicting a young Billy, in character, walking through a convenience store. We then cut to the image of Kris and Billy, in silhouette, watching that same moment in Billy’s home theater. This is the sort of pop-culture immersion in which Schoenbrun specializes, where the lives of her characters and those of their pop-cultural objects of obsessions fold in on each other, simultaneously enveloping our lives as viewers.
Returning to the Camp Miasma killer, he clearly comes from the lineage of Jason in Friday the 13th and Michael Myers in Halloween, yet Schoenbrun contorts the archetype to their own purposes. Wearing a large, extending mask in the shape of a ceiling vent, the character is known in Camp Miasma lore as both “Air Vent Man” and “Little Death.” The killer’s back story, which Kris rightly describes at one point as “transphobic,” taps into the exploration of gender identity that was subtly woven into World’s Fair and made more explicit in I Saw the TV Glow. The name Little Death, of course, brings us back to questions of sexuality, considering the phrase in French (la petite mort) has long been used to refer to an orgasm. As Kris and Billy bond—particularly over a moment from the original Camp Miasma, in which the reflection of Little Death raising his spear can be seen in young Billy’s eye, just as her character is about to be killed/climax—the movie becomes a psychosexual game, one in in which fear, shame, and violence get tangled up in a complicated web. This plays out partly in conversation between Billy and Kris and eventually in a wild, climactic sequence that miasmically melds the line between lived reality and pop fantasy (helped in no small part by a fantastical set design that features the inspired use of matte paintings).
As Kris, Einbinder’s performance grows in complication and revelation. Not only is she quite funny—Kris’ Camp Miasma pitch to a studio exec, via Zoom, is a high-wire act of artistic delusion—she also subtly registers each emotional step of Kris’ psychological journey. In Schoenbrun’s previous features, there was ambivalence about where the characters’ pop-culture fixations ultimately left them. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma strikes a more triumphant posture, one literally embodied by the poses Einbinder adopts in the final scenes. By the movie’s end, Kris has conquered all sorts of fears, and a few desires too.
(8/12/2026)
