Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: Jane Schoenbrun’s open-hearted slasher is playful about sex and cinema
The American director’s third feature explores the relationship between the spectator and the spectated with a meta story of a young director who has been tasked with reviving a cult horror franchise and goes in search of its original ‘final girl’ Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson).
- Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
Jane Schoenbrun’s new film opens with a body. Not a dead one – no, that comes next. What we first see, in an unsteady handheld glimpse, is the form of an on-set actor in a skin tone bodysuit, readying for the next scene of a film that exists within this one. Our gaze stumbles over to a crew member, who fits us with something then stares us dead in the eye. A sudden flash, and the shot reverses – we are inside the film – the one looking, rather than the one being looked at. Rich in potential for microanalysis, the opening sets the tone for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a film fit to burst with interplays and entanglements between the spectator and the spectated. But to say so is to overintellectualise a work that would much rather have you surrender to it.
Kris (an endearingly bashful Hannah Einbinder) is an up-and-coming filmmaker and Sundance discovery (as was Schoenbrun themselves) tasked with delivering an ‘elevated’ remake of the dormant cult horror franchise ‘Camp Miasma’ for a major film studio. A hardcore fan, Kris elects to track down the original film’s ‘final girl’, the reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who has taken up residence in the lodge that Camp Miasma once used as its set. Over KFC and dipping sauce, the two women get acquainted. Transformed with a Southern drawl and Schygulla-esque glamour, Anderson disappears into Billy, a woman who revels in roleplaying. Kris, on the other hand, separates out fantasy from reality, intellectualising obsessively. Gradually, she is coaxed out of her shell. Where I Saw the TV Glow (2024) concerned the act of burying your old self, Camp Miasma is about allowing your true self to rise up and break the surface.
Schoenbrun developed their previous narrative features through a period of gender realisation and transition. Their third effort develops with an invigorating and unexpected carte blanche – formally layered yet remarkably straightforward. For its second act, Kris and Billy sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma projected from the former star’s private print, and the film within the film further unfolds. The mythos and canon Schoenbrun invents is very believable – more sincere than mere pastiche. Camp Miasma’s masked killer is ‘Little Death’ (Jack Haven), a cinematograph-headed being in a deep-sea diver costume, who rises from the depths to penetrate the horny campers with their spear. Little Death’s backstory is tragic – and transphobic, as Kris is eager to point out to a disinterested Billy (“we’re from different generations I guess”). Haven is puckishly self-assured and enigmatic in their entirely wordless performance – one of multiple trans presences here that foster a warm, self-aware safe space for spectators to explore their own identities and cinephilic desires. Sorry, Baby (2025) filmmaker Eva Victor appears as a mohawked gender sceptic named DJ Ella Giastic, and Castration Movie’s Louise Weard cameos as a studio executive’s ‘queer assistant’ on a Zoom call.
Watching the reels, Kris finds herself further fixated on the look in Billy’s eye caught in close-up, captured in the coital second before Little Death strikes – a killer reflected in the iris. Billy encourages her towards the answer, but no academic analysis can pinpoint it. Kris must step outside the film – and outside herself. Ostensibly, she wants to make a movie with Billy, but this is merely her surface-level desire. Just as The Duke of Burgundy (2014) (a clear inspiration) is about more than butterflies, and Secretary (2002) is about more than toxic workplace dynamics, Camp Miasma is about more than slasher film fandom. Kris confesses that she wants to ‘experience’ what she sees, not just watch it, and the film unspools. The liberation of sexual fantasy acts as a formalistic boundary-break. Movie-quoting becomes roleplay; a plot twist a turn-on; a tagline a safe word – each escalating Schoenbrun’s film further towards its climax.
Wise, kind, and playful about sex and cinema, Schoenbrun’s elastic, open-hearted feature wants us to get out of our heads and enjoy the ride. A whole new world of visual pleasure and cinematic possibility opens up before us when we do.
► Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in UK cinemas 21 August.