Synopsis: A young director inherits the dying Camp Miasma slasher franchise. But when she seeks out the original’s reclusive star, she finds a woman who never left the role behind — and a horror that was never fiction.
Stars: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Sarah Sherman, Dylan Baker, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Arthur Conti, Quintessa Swindell, Patrick Fischler
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Rated: R
Running Length: 112 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature is a slasher that tackles horror and desire head-on. Gillian Anderson is having a blast and easily walks off with the movie, while Hannah Einbinder works hard to be the, by nature, least interesting person in the woods. The opening credits alone are worth the ticket, and the last ten minutes will start arguments. Genre fan or not, see it.
Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma Review
Horror has always kept a filthy secret about pleasure. It invites you to revel in blood, sex, fear and transgression, then punishes whoever has the audacity to enjoy them. Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma knows exactly how strange that contradiction is. For Jane Schoenbrun, a lifelong horror obsessive whose relationship with the genre has evolved alongside their identity as a trans filmmaker, those contradictions aren’t simply genre conventions to be poked at. They’re something to be pulled apart, played with and, occasionally, turned inside out.
Part II: The Revenge of the Fake Franchise
The movie announces its intentions before the story even starts. Its opening credit sequence walks through forty-five years of a Camp Miasma franchise that never existed, complete with VHS boxes, posters, board games, action figures and enough increasingly ridiculous sequels to make Jason Voorhees jealous.
Production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland have built an entire cultural history for a movie we never actually saw, stuffing the frame with horror Easter eggs and the sort of lovingly stupid merchandise that makes you wish the fake movies were real. Set to Okay Kaya’s synth cover of “Nightswimming,” it is one of the most deliriously detailed opening credits sequences I’ve seen in years. I wanted the movie to stop so I could examine it.
Hannah Einbinder plays Kris Williams, a young queer filmmaker hired to direct the latest installment of the Camp Miasma franchise, a series that has long since been sequelled into the ground. Kris calls it zombie IP, and she isn’t wrong. The studio wants another reboot. Kris has stranger ideas. To make them happen, she needs Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, TRON: Ares), the final girl from the original Camp Miasma, who walked away from acting after that first film, bought the camp where it was shot and never really left.
Billy has spent four decades living inside the movie that made her famous. Kris arrives hoping to recruit her for the reboot. Instead, the two women begin circling one another as Schoenbrun keeps cutting between the present-day negotiation and long stretches of the original Camp Miasma, recreated in all its lurid 1980s glory. The movie being made and the movie being remembered start bleeding into each other. One is about to become the other, and neither woman seems entirely sure which side of the screen she is standing on.
The result is part slasher, part Hollywood satire, part psychosexual fever dream and, somehow, a very cozy sleepover movie for people whose idea of a good time involves a lot of fake blood.
Part III: The Final Girl Gets a Makeover
The cast list is sprawling, but Camp Miasma is ultimately a two-hander. I’ve enjoyed Einbinder on Hacks, though her stand-up persona has sometimes struck me as one-note. Kris gives her familiar territory: defensive jokes, intellectual anxiety and the perpetual sensation that she’s the smartest person in whatever room she’s occupying. That’s not necessarily a criticism. Kris is supposed to be the least interesting person in her own movie. She spends much of it trying to explain horror rather than simply experience it.
Anderson, meanwhile, got the memo.
As Billy, she is magnificent. She’s a former child star who has spent forty years performing for an audience that no longer exists, and Anderson plays every inch of it. Billy lives at the camp year-round, surrounded by the ghosts of a movie that refuses to stay in the past. Costume designer Kendra Terpenning gives her Biba-inspired silk, fur and, most importantly, a turban that tells you almost everything you need to know about her level of self-awareness. Billy is still in a kind of costume. She just doesn’t have a camera pointed at her anymore.
My favorite part of the work is the way Anderson smiles like she already knows what’s going to happen ten minutes from now and has decided not to spoil it. It’s a delicious performance, equal parts Norma Desmond and camp director from hell. I’ve had my struggles with Anderson in the past, including an accent that occasionally seems to be making its own decisions, but there is none of that here. She is completely locked in. The more Kris tries to understand Billy, the more Anderson seems to enjoy watching her fail.
Amanda Fix has the trickier job as young Billy, playing both the actress and the character that actress was hired to portray. Jack Haven, meanwhile, plays Little Death, the mute killer at the center of the Camp Miasma mythology. The margins are populated by the kind of strange, funny faces Schoenbrun clearly enjoys collecting: Sarah Sherman as Kris’s agent, Jasmin Savoy Brown (Sound of Violence) as Kris’s partner, Zach Cherry (You Hurt My Feelings) as a counselor in the original film and Eva Victor, credited as a DJ, who never actually appears on screen.
Then there’s Little Death.
Part IV: The Killer We Made
A miasma was once believed to be poisonous air, the invisible corruption that made people sick. Schoenbrun takes that idea and puts it over a summer camp where teenagers are slaughtered for wanting each other. But the real mythology is darker. Little Death was once a camper, abused and rejected by the other teenagers for moving between identities. They drowned him, the adults covered it up, and the franchise spent forty-five years turning that buried crime into entertainment.
They made him. Now they pay.
Haven never speaks, and the costume makes sure you can’t quite read the body underneath it. The translucent plastic suit looks like Patrick Bateman’s raincoat grew legs, while the sharp, strangely angled face covering takes a while to reveal exactly what you’re looking at. That’s deliberate, though this isn’t a whodunit. You know who the killer is because the film is all about references to the past and nostalgia boom. The mystery is what you’ve been trained to see when you look at him.
Little Death’s kills are swift, physical and frequently absurdly bloody. Haven plays the character with something unexpected beneath the violence, a flicker of curiosity, boredom or loneliness. The showcase of their rage is a single-take killing spree scored to Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” made possible by a sixty-pound SnorriCam and an apparently insane amount of preparation. On paper, it sounds like the sort of production decision that would send a cinematographer into therapy. On screen, it’s exhilarating.
Schoenbrun has described the sequence as reclaiming the language of the slasher and transforming the killer from a stalking predator into something closer to an “angel of wrath”. Later, Haven gets a moment I won’t describe, because the movie has earned the right to surprise you. It’s unexpectedly beautiful. For a character we’ve been trained for decades to find repellent, Schoenbrun allows the possibility that there might be something worth looking at underneath the bloodied uniform.
Part V: Return of the Practical Effects
That idea extends into the filmmaking itself. Cinematographer Eric Yue shoots the movie’s obviously artificial world as if artificiality were its own kind of reality. The mountains surrounding Camp Miasma are painted backdrops. The snow is practical. The sets look constructed. Nothing quite passes for real, and yet everything feels dangerous. The movie isn’t simply reminding us that old slashers had limited budgets. It’s making a larger point: something doesn’t have to be real to make you feel something real. The camp is fake. The franchise is fake. The killer is fake. The performance is fake. The feelings aren’t.
Yue brings that same eye to food. There is a bucket of KFC shared between Kris and Billy that is photographed with more erotic intensity than most movie sex scenes. I’ve never seen a dipping sauce filmed with such commitment to raw sensuality.
The film’s candy obsession works the same way. Skittles, gummies, Sour Patch Kids and Raisinets keep appearing as little reminders that pleasure doesn’t have to be complicated to be meaningful. Schoenbrun has talked about candy becoming bound up with queer sexuality for them when sex was still surrounded by anxiety. Camp Miasma understands that pleasure can be its own form of aftercare.
Part VI: The Revenge of the Monsters
That’s also where the film’s affection for horror becomes most apparent. This isn’t a filmmaker standing outside the genre with a clipboard, explaining everything it got wrong. Schoenbrun loves these movies. They grew up devouring them. They rented all the Nightmare on Elm Street films in a single week. (As every horror fan does at least once in their lives.) They know the difference between a good fake franchise sequel and a bad one and understand precicesly where to put the needle drop.
More importantly, they remember what those movies taught them. Eighties slashers spent decades turning sexuality, gender variance and overall difference into a toxic shorthand for monstrosity. These films often ogled young bodies, then punished those bodies for wanting anything. They made the outsider frightening and the final girl virtuous, even when the distinction between those things was always messier than the rules allowed.
Schoenbrun isn’t throwing those movies away. They’re taking them back. That makes Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma more affectionate toward horror than its critique might initially suggest. The movie doesn’t seem interested in destroying the slasher so much as asking what happens when the people who were once positioned as its monsters get to write the rules.
For most of its running time, it’s thrilling to watch that happen. The caveat is the final ten minutes.
The Final Chapter: The Ending Strikes Back
For roughly a hundred minutes, Schoenbrun has built one of the year’s most visually alive and intellectually playful horror films, one that keeps finding new ways to make its ideas physical. Then the ending arrives, and I’m not convinced it belongs to the movie that came before it. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’m still processing what Schoenbrun wants me to feel. But right now, several days after I’ve seen the film, the destination feels less satisfying than the unsettling, strange, winding road that got me there.
And yet I’m still thinking about it. That’s not nothing. What lingers after the blood dries isn’t really fear. It’s something closer to relief. Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma takes the things horror taught generations of viewers to associate with shame, danger and monstrosity and asks whether they might instead be sources of pleasure, identity and connection. It doesn’t pretend the old rules didn’t leave scars. It simply refuses to keep playing by them.
Horror has spent decades telling us that pleasure comes with a price. Schoenbrun’s cinematic answer is more mischievous than revolutionary: maybe pleasure was never the most dangerous part. Maybe the really dangerous part was being told you weren’t allowed to have it in the first place.
Looking for something? Search for it here! Try an actor, movie, director, genre, or keyword!
