Review of the Week: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

(15, 112 mins, in cinemas now)

It was in 2021 that Jane Schoenbrun first emerged from behind their glowing laptop screen to deliver their eerie feature debut. We’re All Going to the World's Fair was a meta psychological chiller about a teenage girl who falls deep into an online role-playing game, and – like this year’s indie horror hit Backrooms – it was inspired by the “creepypasta” subculture of online urban legends. That film caught the attention of movie star Emma Stone, who produced Schoenbrun’s neon-hued second feature, I Saw the TV Glow (2024). Now there’s a third, which further builds on the film-maker’s favourite themes of fan community, trans allegory and the power of pop-culture-mediated fantasy.

Hannah Einbinder, the Emmy-winning Hacks star (and outspoken pro-Palestine activist), plays Kris Williams, a “Sundance wunderkind” director who’s been hired to reboot Camp Miasma, a long-dormant slasher franchise – think Halloween or Friday the 13th – about a group of teenagers stalked by “Little Death”, the spear-wielding ghost of a bullied camper who now intermittently emerges from the bottom of Lake Miasma to wreak vengeance.

Kris is aware of how her queer identity is being cynically used by the studio to launder the transphobic 80s original. (Like many horror classics, such as Silence of the Lambs or Psycho, it perpetuated the false idea of gender non-conformity as monstrous and murderous.) But she’s also a true Camp Miasma fan, having once been a lonely kid who found solace there. 

Hoping to cast the first film’s star, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), in her reboot, Kris treks out to the remote, abandoned summer camp, where the actress now resides, ever since her mysterious withdrawal from the film industry. Billy, in her grande dame turban, is more Norma Desmond than Norman Bates – although there’s a touch of the latter too. “Somebody’s got to be here when Little Death comes back,” she deadpans, when Kris questions her choice of home. She’s joking, though … Right …?

If you couldn’t tell, Jane Schoenbrun was also once that lonely, TV-obsessed kid. They’ve spoken before in interviews about their childhood love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X Files, and how, as an 11-year-old, they once devoted an entire month to watching the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels back-to-back. Now they are themselves a Sundance wunderkind, with the necessary buzz to secure The X Files’ Gillian Anderson for their slasher homage. So this film is unabashedly “meta”, yes, but – unlike the Scream franchise, which Nightmare on Elm Street’s Wes Craven helmed in the late 90s – there’s nothing smugly self-referential about it. Instead, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma explores fan devotion at its most intensely earnest, to suggest that this is not necessarily the sign of a dangerously disassociated mind but – ultimately – a route to transcendence. 

The fact that Schoenbrun is a real fan also means they’re able to create a very plausible fictional franchise for Kris and Billy to drift happily into – complete with collectibles, behind-the-scenes scandals and scratchy VHS visuals. Yet they also retain enough directorial distance to appreciate the silly, saucy appeal of a shoddy slasher sequel. This Camp Miasma place is, after all, as camp as a row of temporary summer holiday cabins. The killer has been named in reference to la petite mort, the French euphemism for orgasm, and the film-within-a-film has killings which revel in the ridiculous gore of six-foot-high blood fountains and a severed head that exclaims “Bummer!” as it rolls away.

Gillian Anderson, for one, absolutely understood the assignment, as a long-acknowledged lesbian icon who’s also just one of those people who everyone fancies: man, woman, dog or chair. Her performance leans into that persona by, for instance, announcing in Billy’s over-ripe southern accent that they’ll be dining on KFC that night (“Speaking of desire, do you like dipping sauce?”), and then letting the eroticised fried-chicken finger-lickin’ commence.

Hannah Einbinder as Kris – and probably as Hannah too – is enjoying every moment and, as the two grow closer, Kris confides she can only enjoy sex by imagining herself the “final girl” heroine of a slasher flick. In this way the film calls to the surface – of Lake Miasma and our collective subconscious – the sex-death connection inherent to the genre. Billy encourages Kris to actualise her imaginings, to let her internal self live externally, all building to an ecstatic climax of “flesh and fluid”.

Fantastical perhaps, but possible. Indeed, by bringing together a cast including many non-binary and/or queer talents to stage a frenzied, psychosexual, retro, lesbian meta-slasher, with surprising amounts of near-universal relevance, Schoenbrun has willed into reality a kind of cinema that probably only existed in their head before. It’s film-making with the capacity to simultaneously enjoy our unexamined pleasures and examine their potential harm. What a wild, transformative summer we’re having at Camp Miasma! I hope it never ends!

Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025