There are filmmakers whose movies you admire, and then there are filmmakers whose movies seem to reach into some previously buried part of your brain and awaken something new within you.
Jane Schoenbrun has consistently been the latter for me. I first encountered We’re All Going to the World’s Fair at Sundance in 2021, fittingly during an entirely digital festival, and then was fortunate enough to experience I Saw the TV Glow in person at its Sundance premiere in 2024. Both were unforgettable cinematic experiences that dug into feelings I didn’t necessarily realize were sitting somewhere inside me. I consider both films masterpieces in their own right, so my anticipation for Schoenbrun’s latest feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, was perhaps unfairly high. Thankfully, it proves to be their boldest and most spectacular film yet.
The premise alone sounds like something that could only come from Schoenbrun’s wonderfully strange imagination. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young filmmaker and devoted fan of the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise who is hired to revive the long-dead series. Her solution involves tracking down Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the original film’s Final Girl and has long since disappeared from the public eye. What begins as a knowingly clever exploration of reboot culture gradually becomes something far more intimate, erotic, frightening and profoundly moving.
Camp Miasma opens with a full-blown Friday the 13th-style POV sequence, complete with heavy breathing and an unknown killer stalking through a film set. Then comes an absolutely glorious geyser of blood that immediately establishes that Schoenbrun is not here to make some overly brooding, academic exercise in slasher nostalgia. This movie wants to play in the right kind of macabre way, getting messy and spraying blood in every conceivable direction.
That newfound playfulness is one of the biggest differences between Camp Miasma and Schoenbrun’s previous two features. Their earlier films weren’t completely devoid of humor, but this time around Schoenbrun is clearly cutting loose and having an enormous amount of fun with every filmmaking trick available to them. Among the plethora of horror inspirations Camp Miasma is pulling from, the influence of Evil Dead II is especially apparent in the gleeful excess, practical effects, the bizarre visual flourishes and even the use of matte-painted backgrounds. Schoenbrun has described Sam Raimi’s iconic film as a major inspiration, and it shows.
Those matte-painted exteriors are particularly wonderful, creating a dreamy unreality that makes the entire world feel slightly artificial without ever feeling cheap. Avalon Fast pulls off a similar cinematic magic trick with their own camp-set film, CAMP. There is something magical about seeing a movie so openly embrace the fact that it is a movie. Camp Miasma exists in a strange haze between a slasher film, a fever dream and a meta movie about making movies.
At the center of all of it is Gillian Anderson, and who can never resist the draw of her particular starlight? In this case, it’s the distinct drawl she gives the reclusive and mysterious Billy. She is mesmerizing. The camera seems completely obsessed with her, with cinematographer Eric Yue (Atropia, I Saw the TV Glow) lingering on every movement and expression to convey Anderson herself as a cinematic object of desire - particularly in the eyes of Kris. There is even a product placement sequence where she plates a bucket of KFC fried chicken with such deliberate sensuality that you may never look at the fast food chain in quite the same way ever again. It is absurd in that it is also somehow incredibly hot.
Einbinder (Hacks) is equally fantastic, portraying Kris as someone who has spent her entire life intellectualizing feelings she doesn’t know how to actually express. She describes herself as a filmmaker who explores “the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” considers Camp Miasma her queer awakening, and believes sex is largely a distraction from her work. But the more time she spends with Billy, the harder it becomes to keep those thoughts and desires repressed.
That is where Schoenbrun’s film becomes something much more fascinating than another Scream-style meta-slasher commentary. The fictional Camp Miasma franchise is itself a problematic relic, built around a transphobia-based monster whose tragic backstory has been repeatedly commodified, sanitized and repackaged into something commercially viable. Yet Kris sees something in these movies that the people who made them never understood. She sees desire. She sees herself.
The film’s central question becomes less “Why do people love horror?” and more “What does it mean when the things that terrified us and exposed us to extreme violence also introduced us to lust and desire?” Schoenbrun has clearly spent a lifetime thinking about that question. From Psycho and Peeping Tom to Silence of the Lambs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and beyond, horror films have constantly been finding strange intersections between terror, sexuality, identity and spectatorship. Camp Miasma turns that entire history inside out.
The result is a film about sexual awakening, artistic obsession, repression, Hollywood’s endless appetite for zombifying intellectual property, and the strange power movies have to teach us things about ourselves before we are capable of understanding them. It is also, naturally, a fucking blast.
The movie’s use of music is fantastic, with Alex G returning to score for Schoenbrun once again and needle drops from artists including Sade, R.E.M., Counting Crows, Gerard Way, Sally Shapiro and more being deployed with remarkable thematic precision. A Counting Crows song accompanying one particularly insane bloodbath is inspired filmmaking.
Without spoiling exactly how everything comes together, Schoenbrun turns the traditional slasher chase into something almost completely ecstatic. Sultry music plays as Little Death (Jack Haven), the villain from the Miasma franchise, arises from the depths and comes after Kris. The symbolism isn’t exactly subtle. Desire, fear, sex, death and cinematic fantasy all collide in one spectacularly blood-soaked climax that puts emphasis on the double-entendre of the word "climax". It is ridiculous, beautiful, and genuinely moving all at once.
Perhaps that is what makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma such a perfect and exciting evolution of Schoenbrun’s work. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow were deeply concerned with alienation, repression and the unbearable feeling of knowing that something inside you is desperately trying to get out. Camp Miasma looks at what may happen when you finally let it.
Schoenbrun still understands that movies can be prisons. But they can also be places where we can discover the possibility of escape. Camp Miasma is a horny, bloody, hilarious, gorgeous and endlessly layered love letter to horror cinema and all the strange ways it gets under our skin and reshapes us. It is probably impossible to fully unpack in a single review because Schoenbrun has packed virtually every frame with something worth dissecting. But maybe that’s the point. Sometimes you don’t need to understand exactly why a movie gets inside you. Sometimes you just need to let it.
'Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma' is now playing in theaters.
