Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
Directed by: Jane Schoenbrun
Premise: An up-and-coming filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder) develops a reboot of a 1980s slasher movie series. She tracks down the lead actress (Gillian Anderson) of the original film who is living on the campground that was the setting for that picture.
What Works: Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s previous films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow explored nostalgia and identity and our relationship to media but they also tended toward abstraction. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma explores the same themes but it is (comparatively) more accessible. The film deals with Schoenbrun’s familiar themes in a straightforward and personal way. The protagonist played by Hannah Einbinder is obviously a stand-in for Schoenbrun: an indie filmmaker with some mainstream heat who approaches their work intellectually but has an affection for the lowbrow thrills of exploitation cinema. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is partly about the way cinephiles are haunted by our formative cinematic experiences, especially those of an early age. Einbinder’s character is obsessed with interrogating how this retro slasher film shaped her while the actress played by Gillian Anderson is stuck in the 1980s. The film and the protagonist’s affections for classic slasher films are complicated by guilt. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is partly about the collision between our base appetites for carnality and carnage and our urge to be conscientious consumers. Some of the classic slasher films were misogynistic and transphobic and this film dramatizes the tension that sometimes arises in enjoying movies from an earlier era. That guilt dovetails with the protagonist’s repressed sexuality. All these ideas are at play in Hannah Einbinder’s subtle performance. Gillian Anderson is much showier and she’s very funny. The performance is almost camp but there is a humanity to Anderson that keeps her character real.
What Doesn’t: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is full of ideas, perhaps too many. The intimate concepts are introduced well and intertwined in a way that enhances the whole but the filmmakers try to incorporate even more ideas. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma also attempts to satirize Hollywood’s regard for intellectual property and the way reality and fiction bleed together. These aspects of the film don’t work. They dilute the most interesting aspects of the movie and the film becomes increasingly incoherent. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may not play for a lot of horror audiences. Although it’s steeped in the genre, this is less a horror film or a slasher picture than it is a story of sexual awakening.
Bottom Line: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is doing a lot—some of it very interesting—but the film ultimately buckles under the weight of its ambitions. It’s not much of a horror picture but it will appeal to viewers who like to intellectualize the genre.
Episode: #1115 (September 6, 2026)