Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Three feature films deep and it’s safe to say that Jane Schoenbrun has created a brand new subgenre of cinema. It is cine-literate and self-referential without the ironic detachment associated with meta storytelling. Their films are vividly emotional – and so innovative in finding playful forms to express these emotions – that they deepen the meaning of having a relationship with cinema. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both a continuation of the preoccupations of their first two features and a leap into more vulnerable territory, accompanied by a dazzling step up in the sophistication of the world-within-a-world building. Schoenbrun has form in creating additional media to sit within their films as a source of nurture for protagonists wrestling with secret shames and desires. 

Lonely teen Casey in We’re All Going the World’s Fair (2021) communes with a spooky viral internet game; lonely teen Owen in I Saw the TV Glow (2024) lives vicariously through a TV show called ‘The Pink Opaque’. Here, grown-up intellectual queer filmmaker Kris (Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder) is obsessed with an ’80s slasher franchise that she is now remaking for a modern audience. Schoenbrun shot 20 minutes of the fictional ‘Camp Miasma’ and some actors on the cast list, Eva Victor, for example, exist solely within this film-within-a-film.

Kris (whose past credits include ‘Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain’), believes she was hired to launder the franchise’s transphobic origins, but she’s happy to take the bait because ‘Camp Miasma’ possesses a nascent sexual meaning to her. The root of the root and the bud of the bud is the final girl of the first film: Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who is now living as a recluse on a sleepaway camp that just so happens to be the ‘Camp Miasma’ set, right beside the lake where its spear-wielding villain, Little Death, would periodically emerge for a killing spree.

‘They drowned him. They had to. But still he came back’ reads the poster for ‘Camp Miasma’. Schoenbrun tells the franchise’s story via an opening montage of physical media: a VHS cassette grows into a VHS stack. Then: newspaper headlines; a spin-off arcade game; a star’s decision to release a rap record. The tone is at once affectionate in its nostalgia and mercilessly funny. 

The tone is at once affectionate in its nostalgia and mercilessly funny

There are a museum’s worth of period accurate props to ensure that every frame is alive with detail. This means that the comic targets – the slasher genre, queer academia, film nerdery – are nested in a warm atmosphere and ridicule lands as a love language. ‘This part is transphobic,’ whispers Kris to Billy as they watch a print of the film in her home cinema. ‘Shhhhhh,’ says Billy.

Always a game presence, Anderson raises her own bar to deliver a performance of deeply moving range. She is an object of both desire and fear for Kris. Styled as a Norma Desmond-like fading belle, she also possesses an allure that extends beyond Kris’s casting goals.

Einbinder, acting as the Schoenbrun’s surrogate, holds competing worlds inside of her. Her comic chops shine in laugh-out-loud line readings, yet it’s a scene of heartbreaking sexual insecurity that cracks open the film’s intentions. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta horror-comedy and a whip-smart entertainment industry satire. Still, on a deeper level, in a hole at the bottom of its lake, is a hard-won sexual awakening. The most important shot of the film is an eye lost in pleasure. You’re invited to wonder if the relationship we have with our own personal canons can help to unlock pleasure in our bodies. In other words: there are climaxes other than narrative ones to be liberated and this gift of a film wants that for us.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.