TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is the third movie from writer/director Jane Schoenbrun. I haven’t seen WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR (2021), but I did see I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024), which was released by A24 to great acclaim and adulation.
I confess I didn’t get that one. Didn’t even feel qualified to review it. I love its look, and I was impressed by its creation of a ‘90s tv show called The Pink Opaque that its characters are obsessed with. It’s like the show Videodrome would make in response to the popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I struggled with watching Justice Smith, who was so charismatic on The Get Down, play such a charmless, passive lead. I’ve read that’s because it’s a trans allegory and the character is repressed, and that’s another thing: there is no way on earth that I would know this was a trans allegory without reading about it. It’s interesting to read about, and it’s a movie that means so much to so many (including plenty of cis people I know), but I simply can’t decode it. I can appreciate the vibes, but in that case it wasn’t enough.
CAMP MIASMA is another trans allegory, but it’s more on my frequency. Maybe some of the very specialized things it’s about are also more universal, or maybe it’s just that it’s funnier. But it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s about slasher movies. Up and coming young indie director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder, Hacks) has been hired to reboot a long-running, now moribund summer camp slasher series called CAMP MIASMA. The opening credits have a very detailed montage of franchise history, with 14 movies that mostly line up with the FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels, except there’s a Christmas one and an ARMY OF DARKNESS one and I think a HALLOWEEN 6 thorn cult reference. The most important inspiration, though, is SLEEPAWAY CAMP, with the killer’s psychosis attributed to being raised as both a boy and a girl. Kris says they hired her, a known lesbian, in a cynical attempt to launder the problematicness out of the i.p.
Still trying to come up with a story, Kris goes to a snowy town near Washington’s Canadian border to meet with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN), the reclusive star of the original CAMP MIASMA. Though she turned down the sequels, she’s so attached to the series that she lives in the summer camp where it was filmed. Never got past it, you could say. (This makes me think of when I went to the first, poorly-attended Seattle Crypticon and saw poor Betsy Palmer sitting alone at a table with her sweater from FRIDAY THE 13TH.)
This is a weird movie with some choppings and blood geysers and what not, but it’s mostly a story about these two women of different generations eating candy and discussing movies and sexual hangups while attracted to each other. Also Billy is a weirdo who claims that the killer from the movies, Little Death (Jack Haven, QUEENS OF THE DEAD), is real and lives at the bottom of the lake. You know – by the hole that the movies come out of. Obviously.
(When we see Little Death’s lair it’s a corporate-looking video store with a carpet pattern that might as well be an occult rune the way it transports us to a specific movie experience of the past.)
Kris has gotta be semi-autobiographical for Schoenbrun, having done a low budget movie that she says critics didn’t even like that much but that was academic and queer enough to help her get this opportunity. She’s what they used to call “pretentious” or “an artsy-fartsy type.” She talks about her work in academic terms, writes down “DESIRE” in her notebook while watching a sex scene from CAMP MIASMA VI as research, talks about not wanting to do just another CAMP MIASMA sequel, oblivious to how dismissive that might sound to the actor only known for being in that movie. But I like that in 2026 that doesn’t preclude her from also being a fan.
Because I’m slasher-entrenched, some of the meta ones rub me the wrong way. I couldn’t stand BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON, and couldn’t finish THE FINAL GIRLS, which felt like it was made by people who had not yet had time to watch a horror movie, but felt confident they knew all they needed to know from the parody commercials they’d seen. Schoenbrun is a real one judging from the worldbuilding of the fictional franchise, the references to Pamela Springsteen and Freddy’s wall of souls (R.I.P. Screaming Mad George), and from them including TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION and the PSYCHO remake on a list of influences. I was so impressed that they have a joke about who created THE BURNING and didn’t feel the need to explain it. (I was the only dork who laughed.)
But as Billy tells Kris, there’s more to life and/or movies than rattling off trivia. I’m fascinated by the generational differences between Billy and Kris, who texts to her girlfriend (Jasmin Savoy Brown, SCREAM [2022]) that Billy is more Gen-X than she expected. When they watch CAMP MIASMA together, in the scene where the counselors tell the origin story of Little Death, Kris blurts out “This part is really transphobic,” and Billy tells her to shut up. They’re both right.
Billy says CAMP MIASMA is only about “flesh and fluids.” She feels slasher movies viscerally, as a thing she experienced in real time, instead of as a past artifact to be dissected and interpreted. But it’s not as if Kris doesn’t know how to feel CAMP MIASMA deeply – she vividly remembers seeing it too young as an experience that shaped her sexuality. She’s obsessed with a look young Billy gives in the sex scene, and literally haunted by another facial expression that you’ll recognize if you’ve seen SLEEPAWAY CAMP. There is a power to these movies she can’t put her finger on, let alone imprison inside her academic terminology.
Schoenbrun read Carol J. Clover’s Men Women and Chainsaws around the same age I did, they use the term “final girl” and some of the noted tropes, but they aren’t stuck on “the rules” like SCREAM and its copycats. So much analysis of the genre focuses on the sex = death connotations of HALLOWEEN and its imitators, the accidental or cultural or propagandistic sex negativity: don’t do drugs, don’t have sex, or the boogie man will get you. I appreciate many of the modern slasher movies for going out of their way to demolish that pattern, with female protagonists who can enjoy sex and not be punished or shamed for it by some murderer or some dumb movie. And this movie about middle aged sex and death points out that in 2026 a lady rolling a joint is not prurient, it’s just another thing she likes to do, like listening to Sade while lighting the candles around the bed.
By continuing their theme of pop culture as a portal to find one’s true self through, Schoenbrun has come closer to Clover’s thesis than any of those other movies. The concept of the final girl was not just “there’s a girl who survives at the end,” it was that this subgenre wasn’t as misogynistic as its reputation since the males in the audience were identifying with the final girl, sharing her fear, rooting for her to survive. For Billy to get her performance and for Kris to get past her sexual hangups, they have to switch their perspective to the killer’s, watch themselves outside of their bodies.
This one is original in how much it just lets sex = death and just be okay with it, up to and including naming the killer after an orgasm. In this movie, for some reason, death won’t kill you any more than sex will. (A reclaiming of… being killed?) Kris is almost literally reborn, alive and safe in the form of a final girl in public wearing only panties and a tight crop top, covered in blood, but completely transformed, confident, strutting around like a tiger. We all wish we could be so comfortable.
Kris probly likes I SAW THE TV GLOW more than Billy does. Is it too much of a generalization to say that millennials and Gen-Zers are more open to “vibes based” movies than my generation? Storytelling is not God if memes and Youtube clips were as important to your childhood as Spielberg movies. We loved David Lynch first, obviously, but once you guys found out about him you were so excited we had to let you have him.
I think both generations kind of win here when Schoenbrun does the Lynch thing of going to places that don’t make any literal sense and may not even have a specific intended meaning. Kris tells a column of Hollywood dipshits in a Zoom meeting that no, she is not making a meta movie “like NEW NIGHTMARE by frightmaster Wes Craven.” Little Death is real, watching them, they’re the movie. I choose to take that literally, but I couldn’t explain to you how it works. If we all just go with it then millennials get their vibes and Billy gets to feel instead of analyze.
Perspective and gaze seem to interest both Clover and Schoenbrun, though in different ways. I like how the show-stopping CAMP MIASMA excerpt uses first person perspective. Real slasher movies use a killer’s POV to unnerve us, making us complicit in spying on the unknowing victim from outside their window. But this is not a pastiche, it’s an anachronistic song montage of a wronged ghost avenging his tormenters. I think of it as a poetic interpretation of watching an old movie and siding with the monster when you weren’t really supposed to.
SCREAM speaks to those of us who love horror movies a little too much, but this speaks to the much more advanced horror experience of wrestling with “problematic” movies from the past. That’s a true horror fan – you know it’s fucked up but you still like it! I remember years ago a gay-themed cable network (Logo I think?) was showing SLEEPAWAY CAMP for Halloween and I couldn’t understand why they would celebrate such a horrendous depiction of gender confusion. But I get it now. They’re reclaiming it. You tried to demonize us but it won’t work, because we’ll have fun relating to that demon. It’s ours now. Why not? I like the irony that for the outmoded depiction of gender dysphoria Schoenbrun recruited actual trans actor Jack Haven.
Genre definitions are subjective and unimportant, but to me this isn’t a horror movie, because it’s not trying to scare anybody. It’s using horror imagery as a language to get to an idea about sexual discovery. From what I understand, the central idea (leading to the climax, the little death with Little Death) represents a trans experience of learning to enjoy sex by finally feeling like you’re in the right body. That’s really cool to have something so particular for people to relate to, and for the rest of us I think there are other ways to read it, and plenty of other ideas to chew on, both analytically and poetically.
For me TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA was an excellent cinematic experience. It’s even more beautiful looking than Schoenbrun’s last movie, with a dreamy artificial style. It’s shot on film and I got to see it projected on film, which was appropriate for the topics of ‘80s horror and cinema worship. It has some laughs, both in the jokes and in seeing an audience get a little befuddled. It’s not for everybody, but it’s for alot of different types of people, and I’m happy to be one of them.
August 27th, 2026 at 7:31 pm
This is good news!
We discussed I SAW THE TV GLOW a little bit in one of these threads awhile back — I forget which one — and I had mentioned that I thought it was a clunky, at times heavy-handed, badly written, pretty badly acted, and generally massively overrated slog. I also was underwhelmed by WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR–more understated, less clunky, less of an A24 darling, so less to be annoyed by–but still kind of a nothingburger. But hope springs eternal, and this one looks at least more balls out and fun. I’m a little leery that some of what I’ve heard (e.g., the slasher’s name is “Little Death” ~ “orgasm”) following the pattern from TV GLOW of Schoenbrum being decidedly unsubtle and making subtext text. Unlike Vern, I thought the trans allegory aspects of TV GLOW had all the subtlety and nuance of a 2×4 across the face. Certain things I’ve heard about this give me some of those same vibes. Make a great and completely unsubtle trans-centric movie or make a great but very subtle, allegorical trans-subtext movie. I’ll give it a whirl–just make it good.
Still and all, this one at least looks like it wants to have fun, plus there’s a slasher element, plus I like that Schoenbrum has some novel thematic interests and desire to experiment w/ various kinds of horror-adjacent sub-genres and storytelling styles. I want them to keep trying weird stuff, and I want some of it to actually live up to the hype and be an unambiguous winner for me. So, I’m definitely going to check this one out, though this one may wait til streaming.