TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA
2026
Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
It would be a not too-unreasonable interpretation of Teenage Sex and Death At Camp Miasma, and it wouldn't be outright contradicted as far as I recall, if you understood one of its characters to be imaginary, like Tyler Durden, or, better yet, like a nicer version of that French extremity movie I shouldn't recklessly spoil, even though it's just about as old*; and Camp Miasma would be more functional if this were the case. The upside of this interpretation is that it would still be what it already is, a film about the non-imaginary character figuring out how to reconcile her neuroses with her deepest, darkest kinks, perhaps as a metaphor (or as a practical use case) for engaging with art with open-heartedness, rather than defensive hostility. The downside, besides being reductive, is that it would turn this 112-minute psychothriller (which, in this regard, could stand to be reduced) into, basically, the story of the woman who learned how to masturbate. There are no bad subjects, they say.
That runs aground a little against a movie that'd call you crazy for even trying to mark any dividing line between reality and fantasy; if you had to have it one way or another, it'd say, "it's an imaginary story. Aren't we all?" It's still cumbersome, because the "real" parts of it are tonal wrecks, especially when it's using its remaining fragments of "reality" to continue cracking jokes right through a third act that's supposed to be transcendent, so I can't even say "once this movie gets going, which it takes an exhaustingly long time to do, it becomes a thoroughly good movie I'd wholeheartedly recommend," as I felt comfortable-enough doing with this filmmaker's last film, I Saw the TV Glow, which had the exact same problem.
So Camp Miasma, like Jane Schoenbrun's last film, is necessarily a pretty slippery thing, and it's interesting enough, at least, that I don't mind being beneficent towards it; it helps that, despite the above complaints, it really does end on its strongest material, even if it ultimately probably contains less "good movie" than good movies should. It would actually not be too much, I think (and Schoenbrun, albeit using different language, like the phrase "trilogy," has effectively given us permission to do so), to describe it as a remake of TV Glow. The difference is that that one was about gender, this one's about sex, but that's arguably just valence: in both, what we get is obsessive freak fanchildren, for it has been Schoenbrun's whole deal to date, despite their significant generational advantage (they're practically my age), to describe how pop culture has swallowed us up, so that we cannot define ourselves except by reference to our favorite media; the mitigating factor that makes Schoenbrun's last two movies cooler than they readily could be is their newfound sense of humor about how the nichest of cultural products can, nonetheless, sometimes help the similarly lost and lonely find themselves. So the difference, anyhow, is that in TV Glow it was a 90s young adult fantasy television show that was, besides being a household name, essentially Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whereas in Camp Miasma it's slasher movies and specifically the (fictional) Camp Miasma series, which is a rip-off of Friday the 13th plus Sleepaway Camp (both extant references inside the film, mind you), and this IP achieved incredible popularity in its day, perplexingly so, given how derivative it is and how it arrived in the second half of the 1980s, blundering its way into the much less-happening slasher marketplace of the second slasher wave. But let's save that.
Like any once-popular thing in 2026, Camp Miasma is getting resurrected, and the woman for the job is hip gay writer-director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), providing optical camouflage for the controversial franchise, but what her studio mightn't have understood is how fearsomely Kris is into it. Thus, all on her own initiative, she has ventured out to remote, snowy Cascadia to try persuading Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the present-day recluse who once played the final girl in the first Camp Miasma (Amanda Fix, not an incontrovertible "young Gillian Anderson"), to be part of her reboot; on her arrival at not an address but a set of coordinates, she discovers that Billy has, after a fashion, never left old Camp Miasma, for she's made its abandoned sleepaway camp shooting location her home out here in the sticks. Billy's hospitable, though she manages more interest in Kris herself than in Kris's work, which is awkward because Kris is nothing besides her work and this, meanwhile, causes all sorts of feelings to well up in the filmmaker, shame foremost, given that Billy's character in Camp Miasma was the foundation of her sexual identity, and Billy's most erotic moments therein were followed shortly by her death. But this is, after all, Camp Miasma; you can't have even a little of the one without a lot of the other.
For starters, let's identify what totally doesn't work, namely the gruesomely-blatant self-insertion of an up-and-coming filmmaker, which feels faintly pitiful even when it's self-deprecating (not to rebuild the movie from its foundations, but "group of fans go to the shooting location" feels like a more natural slasher set-up). Either way, it prompts the most useless parts of the movie that are nonetheless a sizeable fraction of it, although I'm probably conflating the slightly-less-useless-but-no-more-enjoyable parts with Kris's unsatisfying polycule back in LA., and years into their career we're still dealing with the perennial Schoenbrun problem of not really knowing how to put, like, stuff into their movies; they've been iteratively attacking this problem, and Camp Miasma's the most polished so far, in its illusion of content, but it actually works less well than TV Glow's languidity, because what's filling the dead air here is just indifferent, stale Hollywood satirical comedy and irritating, stale relationship satirical comedy. And I might feel differently if it seemed like it mattered, but it emphatically doesn't; I genuinely wish you luck trying to figure out how Kris's Camp Miasma gets changed by her time at Camp Miasma. So it's thinly-conceived filler covering big gaps in a screenplay only after the one goal, and didn't actually require a whole movie to reach that goal, so it didn't get one.
If it does matter, it's to provide some framework by which to understand Kris, and a framework through which Billy (to the extent she exists) can understand what's wrong with Kris; and in pursuit of that aforementioned ultimate goal, the movie would like to tell you that one thing wrong with Kris and, by extension, basically everybody these days, is how she watches movies, especially movies like Camp Miasma. You've probably heard the phrase "film as film criticism." Here's "film as criticism of film criticism." So it's a movie set on deconstruction, except the target here is the tools people use to deconstruct movies, and it's dismayed by the seepage of bastardized academic discursive methods into Internet fandoms (and vice versa), that amounts to woke checklisting any halfwit could manage—if it's not, in fact, just using art as a transparent excuse to perform propaganda barely relevant to that art—and which also has the tedious tendency to treat movies as documentary footage of alternate universes, making it morally obligatory to hold its participants, including its fictional ones, accountable for their sins. And what Schoenbrun would prefer, having obviously spent much of their life in this mode and around people of a similar mindset, is to somehow get back to art as a vital emotional experience rather than an intellectually-hidebound and aridly-literalist one, a sandbox in which people might play with ideas and feelings that cannot be played with so lightly in life—"play" being the specific word used to grant permission to Kris's sexual fantasies—so that at the end of the day, we could consider Camp Miasma's sexuality to be the allegory for "its point" rather than the reverse, or accord it credit of having more than one thing on its mind, or accept that in this context they're the same thing anyway, so just surrender to its honest offer of an emotional experience, you frightened little prude. (It'd make a decent "your title makes me uncomfy" double-feature with I Want Your Sex.)
As far as that goes, great: I agree with your argument, and emotions were had. That still leaves some measure of "so what?", because I already knew that's what movies were for, and until a ways in, when it starts plumbing its BDSM psychohorror in earnest, it's not only dragging, but by its nature ("the repressive way we're trained to experience and evaluate art actually represses us") somewhat can't help but drag, or at least it makes sense why it would be hard for it not to. So while there's certainly folks who could get plenty out of this, this viewer was disappointed by how massively incomplete it feels, thanks to its extremely limited aims: for all Schoenbrun's apparent noble desire, they've still just made a movie that reflects what their own movie says they're sick of, a movie that talks about the thing instead of being the thing. Which, God knows, is not much of any new wrinkle to the slasher, which has since Scream increasingly become only blaringly-meta self-examinations (with short pop cultural half-lives: "is Camp Miasma like 2015's The Final Girls?" isn't a question anyone's even asked, even if the Scream franchise has, itself, managed to persevere long enough to become slasherdom's single worst major franchise), or more-lightly-meta mash-ups into another genre altogether (Hearteyes being a recent example, though the prototype, I think, is Happy Death Day). It's meant that, today, nearly the only slashers seriously innovating without metacinema are the Terrifiers.
And, you know, that's if we accept this is "a slasher," and maybe it didn't have to be, though it wants to understand horror (sexualized horror, particularly) through that lens and only that lens, even though other lenses might've been better, and felt less like you were being lectured to by somebody who didn't know the material. Because, weirdly or not, Camp Miasma is cut off at the knees by the weaknesses of film discourse identified within Camp Miasma, a slasher seemingly made by somebody who has read a lot about slasher movies without actually watching many. Which I'm positive cannot be true, but the way it seems to understand slasher cinema is still "academic and pseudo-academic exegesis" (of the kind that finds fascination in axioms like "all final girls have androgynous names," you know, like "Ginny," or "Nancy"), and I mean this beyond the quibbles I personally could've had with its seemingly-wholehearted embrace of the whole "sex = death" thing, because at least by the end it really has arrived from its own starting place at more-or-less the same notion I have about slashers ("gather ye rosebuds while ye may," and all the more urgently for its a-decade-away-from-teenaged protagonist). Yet until then, it regards them from an enormous distance, oddly more adept at "re"-creating VHS box covers for an opening expositional montage regarding its imaginary franchise (under a cover of REM's immensely-melancholy, virginity-tinged "Nightswimming," that, for better and worse, winds up being one of the movie's best sequences, even if it promises much better judgment about needledrops than gets demonstrated later) than anything inside a slasher. I mean, I've only identified three actors, for two characters, in a genre that typically asks for an ensemble. We'll get one more actor who matters, Jack Haven, Schoenbrun's enby muse, as "Little Death" (geddit), the gender-bending and increasingly-transhuman villain of those problematic old Camp Miasmas, effectively the villain of Sleepaway Camp but, for their noncomformity, drowned like the villain of Friday the 13th, and there is much Grant Morrisonesque (or Wes Cravenesque) questioning of Little Death's own reality. This is all good, too.
And then there's just the way it has to grind its way through the hostility it presumes you have, to the point of disingenuousness—for instance, the insistence that slashers don't typically agree that the sins of the past powering the present vengeance were, actually, sins. But I guess the original Camp Miasma doesn't, since in lieu of this movie existing, for an appallingly solid stretch of runtime we're just watching the original Camp Miasma alongside our heroines, and, amongst other things, Little Death's meat-treats confirm (via annoyingly-shaggy "comedy") the justice of murdering some kid who was a boy some days and a girl others. Moreover, this turns out to be what Schoenbrun makes of an "actual" slasher film, only what every filmmaker does with a movie-within-their-movie: a laughlessly-stupid no-Goddamn-good pastiche, and still swerving between two incompatible modes, "haha, it's so bad" parody and wrongheadedly-serious satirical critique, the latter being severely stressed by the borderline-nonconsensual deflowering of Billy's final girl, through which Kris, lo many years ago, had what she calls her "queer awakening," because without realizing it she's admitted that she's a pervert whose core fantasy involves this scene's conclusion with a knock-off of the infamous "forever wed" dual-impalement death from Bay of Blood, as more-sensitively reinterpreted in-between by Steve Miner in Friday the 13th Part 2.
And there's either something very complicated or merely very wrong happening there—sex badgering certainly exists in slashers, but it isn't made to feel like this, cold and clammy, is it? (Never clammy: in regards to a complex of shame, desire, trauma, and, Christ, even complicated feelings towards your art, there is very little here that Slumber Party Massacre II didn't do better; notably, that's a franchise it doesn't reference.) And increasingly Billy speaks of this movie scene—"aged 23, playing 17"—as her actual deflowering, a memory both despised and treasured; this remains, of course, in the phase of the movie where Billy is sort-of still "a real character," with Anderson flinging this miserable Southernistic accent at the role for no apparent reason besides affording Billy some gonzo notion of specificity (Einbinder, at least, is genuinely good, without having to sift through a barrage of unprovoked dialect work), while also seeming to experience psychological distresses of her own that have vanished long before the movie ends, just like any other element of her autonomous personality. Besides the movie-within-the-movie, anyway (should Kris have asked, astonished, how that scene could be unsimulated?**), Billy never gets another orgasm. One of the ways this feels like masturbation is this essentially-pornographic set-up of the girl being serviced by mommy,*** and, to take that somewhat seriously, it really is one way Camp Miasma feels incomplete beyond psychosexual self-exploration (Kris learned to cum—swell—but I missed the part where Kris learned to love), Billy somewhat expressly becoming a prop to mediate the real relationship, between the part of Kris that's the final girl that destroys the villain and the part of Kris that's the villain that destroys her.
So if that casts some doubt on the "you just didn't get it" interpretation of the messiness of here, much of the remainder does the same, especially anytime we see Little Death do anything more complicated than existing menacingly, with these cartoon blood geysers like the end of Tenebre but with bad CGI, that get at an ejaculatory "abstraction of death" the first time, and just feel stupid every other time, though never moreso than in the insipid demo reel of a long-take Schoenbrun's decided to make a centerpiece here, a bizarre sequence set to the first song that came up on shuffle (hand to God: Counting Crows' 1996 single, "Long December"), that at least starts well-built, technically, and has the vaguely-interesting idea of switching the POV around from Little Death to their victims during their massacre, which would play better if either of the sequence's two jokes did, namely Little Death getting tuckered out in the middle of it, or the entire roomfull of victims, sometimes still on-camera, just standing there waiting for cues. (Third joke: Schoenbrun's 100% had Friday the 13th Part VII described to them!) Audiovisually, the whole movie's going for "latterday 80s," naturally, and "modern 80s movie" is such a well-established rut by now that it takes a lot for it to be a special treat, though let's grant it does it well; but, notwithstanding the self-indulging oner, this does leave the movie-within-the-movie to be the "threadbare primitivist crap" version of that, somewhat excused by the 16mm home print but a Friday-sized phenomenon would probably need to be about as well-made as your average Friday, if not, by this point, a Nightmare. And by the surrealistic third act, the actual-movie has surrendered "make-pretend 80s" for "Andersonian storybook," which would've worked slightly better if Camp Miasma's now-banished wintry aspect hadn't been all-brazen-CGI-set-extension-if-not-outright-AI already.
There is, too, Little Death themselves: a slasher villain with a box on their head, like an air conditioner grate (I believe it's supposed to resemble an old-timey camera, or an old-timey projector assembly, either of which makes more sense), and it really is a strain to believe this was wildly successful. It was, though: that expositional montage makes it clear that this was a mid- or even late-80s phenomenon, which means Schoenbrun's created an alternate industrial history altogether here. And that's sort of tantalizing, because you know what other late-80s horror phenomenon—we could call it "a slasher," though it often isn't, and maybe that's the problem—doesn't get referenced? It's dizzying when you realize that this movie about a killer with a weird head, and a final girl whose deepest desire is to get fucked to death by a transdimensional monster, either doesn't know Hellraiser, or so completely understands that it should be a Hellraiser that it mustn't mention that name aloud.
Score: 6/10
*Hope your ass is ready to have Sleepaway Camp spoiled, though.
**I, meanwhile, have asked what kind of "final girl" gets shish-ka-bobbed halfway through the picture.
***Not expressly, and also Anderson, frankly too young to have played Dana Scully, is too young to have starred in a mid-80s slasher, which perhaps means you wanted her to take off her clothes, too, but no joy. Also, it's worth mentioning, as a minor nitpick, that Schoenbrun has created some staging-geometry issues with an iconic demise invented to send two people into eternity in the missionary position.
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