The 39-year-old director Jane Schoenbrun has a wild imagination but a consistent theme: they're fascinated by the media obsessions that shaped some of us as young people, perhaps even offering us a sense of refuge and belonging that the outside world could not. Schoenbrun's 2021 debut, We're All Going to the World's Fair, was an eerie experimental horror film about a teenager caught up in an online role-playing game. Then came the 2024 drama I Saw the TV Glow, about two teens bonding over a Buffy-style TV series, which Schoenbrun, a transgender filmmaker, turned into a stealthy commentary on trans experience.
Now we have Schoenbrun's third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It draws its title from a fictional slasher movie called Camp Miasma, which was a big hit sometime in the 1980s and, like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and countless other horror touchstones of its era, has spawned an increasingly rudderless series of sequels. Schoenbrun recaps the history of the Camp Miasma franchise in a dazzlingly witty opening-credits sequence that I want to watch again slowly, one frame at a time: it's the work of an artist who knows how to spoof and embrace pop-cultural phenomena in astoundingly meticulous detail.
Hannah Einbinder, from the HBO Max comedy series Hacks, stars as Kris Williams, a 29-year-old independent filmmaker who's writing and directing a Camp Miasma reboot. She's hoping to persuade Billy Presley, who starred in the original movie, to reprise her role in the new one. Billy is something of a recluse; she lives in the Pacific Northwest, in a remote lakeside cabin on the very grounds where Camp Miasma was shot. Kris is in a nearby cinema, watching a scene from that first film, when Billy, played by Gillian Anderson with a Southern accent and a fabulous aura of Old Hollywood glamour, approaches her in the theater.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is frequently funny as a satire of contemporary filmmaking. Schoenbrun takes knowing aim at the industry's obsession with sequels, reboots and origin stories, its overuse of trauma as a horror trope, and its often performative approach to inclusion and social justice. The original Camp Miasma, which featured a gender-fluid killer laying waste to a summer camp, has since been accused of transphobia — a criticism that Kris, who approaches cinema through a queer academic lens, wants to correct in her own project. More than once, though, the older, worldlier Billy tells Kris to stop over-intellectualizing everything, noting that in the movies, we respond to sex and horror on a pure, visceral level. True to its title, Teenage Sex and Death is fascinated by the connections between what excites us and what scares us.
It's no surprise when Kris and Billy begin to explore their own growing feelings for each other. Their sex scenes are played for some wry humor; Anderson has been an LGBTQ+ icon for decades, since her days on The X-Files. But there's also a genuine warmth and tenderness here that builds on the actors' natural chemistry. Both characters, it turns out, have had their own physical and psychological hang-ups about sex, and the movie's most bracing element is the way it lets them confront those issues together. In Kris' case, that means exploring the voyeuristic and violent fantasies that drew her to the Camp Miasma movies in the first place. There's a sly paradox at play here that I think more than a few horror aficionados will relate to: a boudoir slathered in blood can suddenly become the safest of spaces.
Schoenbrun is a madly ambitious talent, deconstructing the nature of genre one moment and channeling an uneasy Lynchian mood the next. At times, they run the risk of stretching the film's many, many ideas past the point of redundancy. And there's one set-piece — a killing spree from Camp Miasma, ironically set to a hit '90s song — that for many will be the movie's gory highlight, though I checked out of it pretty early on. Perhaps I was impatient to get back to Kris and Billy, two characters that Schoenbrun and the actors clearly love to pieces. It's the highest compliment I can pay Einbinder and Anderson that somewhere out there, their performances are already captivating a new generation of pop-culture obsessives.
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