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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Crawled Inside My Brain and Redecorated
Jane Schoenbrun made a psychosexual meta-slasher about desire and becoming yourself, and I haven't recovered.
There are movies you watch, and there are movies that crawl inside your skull and redecorate. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the second kind. I sat in the dark for almost two hours, and when the credits rolled, I did not move. I did not check my phone. I sat there like a woman who had been gently concussed by art and needed a minute before rejoining society.
Jane Schoenbrun has made two of the most interesting horror-adjacent films of the last few years with We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Both of those explored identity and dysphoria through this dark, aching, deeply personal lens.
Camp Miasma completes what Schoenbrun has called a spiritual trilogy, and where the first two films lived in confusion and fear, this one lives in liberation. In discovery. In finally, finally arriving in your own body after decades of feeling like a stranger in it. And they wrapped all of that inside a psychosexual meta-slasher about a fictional '80s horror franchise, because of course they did.
TMJ Rating: 🍬🍬🍬🍬/5
What You Need to Know
Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a young queer filmmaker hired by a studio to resurrect Camp Miasma, a once-beloved slasher franchise that peaked in the '80s and has been dying a slow, embarrassing death through increasingly terrible sequels.
The studio hired her specifically because she's queer, hoping her identity will shield them from backlash over the franchise's transphobic origins. Kris knows this. She resents it. And she has much bigger plans.
She tracks down Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the original final girl from the first Camp Miasma film, now a recluse living on the actual campgrounds where the movie was shot. What starts as a pitch meeting spirals into something far stranger and far more intimate as both women descend into a fever dream of desire, memory, and the blurred line between fiction and flesh.
Why I’m Still Thinking About It
The way this film handles female sexuality is phenomenal.
Kris eventually confesses to Billy that the original Camp Miasma was her sexual awakening. That she can't finish with another person unless she's deep inside a maladaptive daydream where she's the final girl, running through the woods in her underwear, being chased by something monstrous.
And she's ashamed of it. She knows it contradicts everything she believes politically. She knows it's "problematic." And Billy looks at her and essentially says: stop intellectualizing it. Stop thinking. Feel it.
That tension between what we believe we should want and what we actually want? The way desire refuses to be tidy or politically convenient? I have never seen a film handle that with this much honesty and this little judgment.
As someone who wrote an entire dissertation about female power in fiction, watching a movie articulate the messiness of female desire without flinching or moralizing was genuinely thrilling.
The meta-commentary on how Hollywood treats queer creators is razor sharp and wickedly funny. There's a Zoom pitch meeting with studio executives that is so painfully accurate it borders on documentary. One person's label on the call reads "queer assistant." They say exactly one sentence the entire meeting.
Hannah Einbinder carries the emotional weight of this film with a performance that shifts between nervous intellectual energy and raw vulnerability so seamlessly that you forget you're watching someone act.
And Gillian Anderson is doing her absolute finest work here. She's channeling Gloria Swanson from Sunset Boulevard with this magnetic intensity that makes every scene between her and Einbinder feel like the screen might catch fire. Their chemistry is the engine of the entire movie, and it never stalls.
Speak of the Devil…Little Death
The franchise's killer is named Little Death. La petite mort. If you know, you know. Jack Haven plays the role with this eerie, beautiful stillness, and the character's backstory, a kid at camp who moved between presenting as a boy and a girl and was drowned by peers for it, takes the transphobic "twist killer" trope from films like Sleepaway Camp and reclaims it completely.
Little Death isn't the monster. Little Death is liberation. The killing spree sequence where the music goes from eerie to euphoric and the film grain shifts from '80s to modern? That's when I understood what this movie was doing, and my entire brain rearranged itself.
The visual language throughout is stunning. Painted backdrops that look deliberately artificial. Candy wrappers everywhere like some recurring fever dream motif. Close-ups of Billy that go soft and slightly out of focus, like she exists in a different era of filmmaking. Eric Yue's cinematography makes every frame feel like you're watching something that's half memory, half hallucination.
Where Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Gets Tricky
The middle section where Kris and Billy watch the original Camp Miasma film-within-the-film drags slightly. It's atmospheric and purposeful, but there's a stretch where I felt the pacing soften enough that my attention wavered.
Some of the VFX during the slasher sequences also don't quite hold up, though honestly, in a movie this deliberately artificial and dreamlike, I'm not sure how much that matters.
And if you haven't seen Sleepaway Camp or don't know the discourse around it, a significant layer of what Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is doing will fly right over your head. This is a movie made for people who love horror and understand its history. If that's not you, parts of this will feel incomprehensible.
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My Final Verdict
This is the kind of horror movie I've been begging the universe for. Joyful where the genre usually punishes. Honest about female desire where the genre usually exploits it. Funny, gorgeous, deeply strange, and so personal that every frame feels like Schoenbrun opened a vein and let it run.
Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson deliver performances that will haunt me well past Halloween.
This is what happens when studios let a singular creative voice make exactly the film they want to make, and it's extraordinary.
