What scares us? What turns us on? Can pleasure and pain occupy the same space? And, ultimately, what does it take to make us actually feel something?
Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is fascinated by these questions, treating sex and horror as two expressions of the same visceral impulse. It is a film about desire, but also about the things that frighten us about desire: vulnerability, shame, power, fantasy and the possibility of losing control.
The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a 29-year-old indie filmmaker tasked with directing a new version of the long-dormant slasher franchise Camp Miasma. To prepare, Kris travels to the remote Pacific Northwest location where the original film was shot, hoping to persuade Billy (Gillian Anderson), its reclusive former star, to return for the reboot.
It is an appropriately strange place for Schoenbrun to stage this collision between cinema and reality. Billy still lives on the original Camp Miasma set, surrounded by the physical remnants of a film that has consumed much of her identity. As Kris becomes increasingly fascinated by Billy, the distinction between researching a movie and becoming part of one begins to dissolve.
Visually, Schoenbrun builds on the aesthetic of I Saw the TV Glow, but pushes it into something more expansive and deliberately artificial. The film is often conspicuously set-bound, with painted backdrops, theatrical lighting and production design that constantly reminds us that we are watching a constructed world. Rather than hiding its artifice, Schoenbrun makes it the point. Camp Miasma is a film about films, but it is also a film about what happens when the things we watch become indistinguishable from the things we want.
Anyone familiar with Schoenbrun’s previous work will know not to expect easy narrative answers. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is deliberately slippery, moving between reality, fantasy, memory and cinema without always telling us which is which. At times this is exhilarating; at others, it can feel almost frustratingly opaque. Schoenbrun is less interested in solving the mystery than in making us inhabit the uncertainty.
That approach is particularly effective when the film turns to the relationship between media obsession and queer identity. Schoenbrun has repeatedly explored the way fictional worlds can become lifelines for people who feel alienated from the world around them, and Camp Miasma continues that preoccupation from a distinctly adult perspective.
For Kris, the franchise is not simply something she likes. It is part of the architecture of her identity. Her desire to remake a notorious slasher—one whose gender-fluid killer has subsequently been accused of transphobia—becomes an attempt to reconcile the things that formed her with the person she has become. The question is not simply whether problematic art can be redeemed, but why we remain emotionally attached to art that has complicated or even uncomfortable histories.
That gives Schoenbrun plenty of opportunities to take aim at contemporary filmmaking. The film skewers Hollywood’s endless appetite for sequels, reboots and origin stories, as well as the industry’s tendency to convert trauma into marketable shorthand. Yet Schoenbrun understands the absurdity of the industry without pretending to stand completely outside it.
In fact, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma occasionally comes close to committing the same sins it mocks. There are moments when its layers of references and self-awareness threaten to overwhelm the emotional story underneath them. But that contradiction is also part of the film’s charm. It feels less like a lecture about bad filmmaking than the knowing eye-roll of someone who has spent far too much time loving movies.
The film is also frequently hilarious, and arguably Schoenbrun’s funniest work to date. Sarah Sherman is particularly good as Kris’s agent, playing the entertainment industry’s carefully calibrated mixture of cynicism, enthusiasm and performative concern as broad comedy without turning the character into a simple caricature.
But the real centre of the film is the chemistry between Einbinder and Anderson.
Einbinder brings Kris an appealing combination of awkwardness, intelligence and barely concealed desire. Anderson, meanwhile, is having an enormous amount of fun as Billy, playing her as part faded movie star, part seductive fantasy and part woman who has simply refused to leave the world of the film behind. Their dynamic is funny, unsettling and unexpectedly tender.
I was lucky enough to attend the Q&A screening at Soho Curzon, where Anderson spoke thoughtfully about the central age-gap relationship. When asked how the filmmakers ensured the dynamic never felt unnatural, she emphasised the importance of avoiding both predatory and motherly connotations, allowing the relationship to feel fully reciprocal instead. That reciprocity is crucial. The film’s interest in desire is not about reducing attraction to a neat category. It is interested in the uncomfortable territory where vulnerability, power, pleasure and fear overlap. Kris intellectualises almost everything, attempting to understand her feelings by analysing them. Billy’s response, by contrast, is essentially: stop thinking and experience them.
This becomes one of the film’s most interesting tensions. Kris wants cinema to explain desire to her; Billy wants her to actually experience it.
And Schoenbrun seems to be asking whether that is even possible. Can we ever respond to sex and horror on a purely visceral level, without bringing along our histories, identities, anxieties and cultural baggage? This is where Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma becomes more ambitious than its lurid title initially suggests. The film understands that horror has always had an erotic dimension. Slashers turn sex into spectacle, vulnerability into entertainment and bodies into objects of both desire and destruction.
Slasher fans will find plenty to enjoy in this film’s deliberately unrealistic gore, while devotees of 1980s horror will appreciate the meticulous attention to genre detail. Schoenbrun uses the machinery of the slasher to examine how queer people, in particular, can inherit cultural objects that were never really made with them in mind—and then transform those objects into something personal.
That may be the film’s greatest strength. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma doesn’t ask whether the films we loved growing up were good for us. It asks something more complicated: what do we do with the things that helped us become ourselves, even when they are messy, contradictory or deeply flawed?
Schoenbrun remains a fabulously ambitious filmmaker, and here that ambition is inseparable from the film’s subject. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is fascinated by the things that excite us precisely because they can also frighten us, and by the strange ways cinema teaches us what those feelings are supposed to mean. It is sometimes messy, funny, visually extraordinary, genuinely strange and unexpectedly sincere.
But, most importantly, it understands that horror and desire are not opposites. Both are forms of surrender. Both ask us to give up a little control. And both can make us feel something before we have worked out exactly what that feeling means.
And, as the film repeatedly reminds us: If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is released in UK cinemas August 21st
