20 August 2026

Death has never been more camp

Jane Schoenbrun’s film about a rebooted horror franchise is an exhilarating celebration of cinematic sex and gore

The opening credit sequence of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a marvel. We seem to be on a film set, our point of view that of the heavy-breathing menace. Then we’re outside looking on, seeing a horrible killing: the butchering of an innocent couple and a ludicrous geyser of blood. The monster, wielding a spear, has a weird metallic box over its head – a bit like a big film camera, or maybe an entire ceiling vent?

This, we quickly realise, is the original Camp Miasma, the founding film in a Friday the 13th-type slasher franchise from the Eighties. We cycle rapidly through its entire history, in posters, stills, press cuttings and merch, from initial acclaim (“Move over Jason!”) to the first disappointing sequel (“star opts not to return”) and its decline into a video game and a cartoon meme. By the time we’ve reached Camp Miasma IX, it’s become a joke (“a ho ho horrible excuse for a movie”). Camp Miasma has become “zombie IP”.

So a “Sundance wunderkind” has been hired to give it a woke reboot. Kris (awkward but endearing Hannah Einbinder, Ava in the TV comedy Hacks) is 29, queer and polyamorous but frustrated. “My work explores the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” she announces. Though she may have remade Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain, love and sexual fulfilment remain sadly theoretical for her.

Camp Miasma, it turns out, has been formative for Kris since childhood, particularly the scene in which “the last girl” (Amanda Fix) reaches orgasm observed by the metal-headed monster, “Little Death”. So she wants to find that original actress for her origin story. Billy Presley, now 60 (Gillian Anderson, walloping the role), is discovered living alone in the original lodge where Camp Miasma was filmed, an imperious recluse, obsessed with her past, another Norma Desmond with a wild Southern drawl, constantly sketching Little Death’s boxy maze of a face.

“Someone’s got to be here when Little Death comes back,” she tells Kris. “Little Death isn’t real,” Kris protests. “Not with that attitude, he isn’t,” she scornfully retorts. “There’s a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from and he’s waiting down there. He always comes back.”

They bond over snacks and junk food – “Do you like… dipping sauce?” Billy asks – and rewatching the original film, but not over Kris’s academic theories. Camp Miasma was about “two very simple things – flesh and fluids”, Billy tells her. And over the next few days Kris is seduced. She admits to Billy: “I’ve never been able to get there with somebody else, unless I’m far away in my head.” Far away in Camp Miasma, in fact, imagining herself to be a character in a slasher film, a slut, chased by Little Death, “tits bouncing as I run for my life, waiting for him to penetrate me”.

It’s stupid, so embarrassing, so misogynistic, Kris knows. But it’s what works for her, and Billy makes it happen. “Let’s do it, let’s make a movie,” she says, caressing her. And that’s the slaughterous, sexy film we see, full of flesh and fluids, ending with both of them blood-soaked and blissed out.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a great ride – it’s fast, funny and knowing as well as scary, and the third unmissable, innovative horror film this year, alongside Backrooms and Obsession. Not just zingily scripted, it’s also exhilaratingly inventive and visually allusive. It’s the ebullient creation of the 39-year-old trans director Jane Schoenbrun, who Paul Schrader calls “the most original voice in film in the last decade”.

Schoenbrun’s previous features include I Saw the TV Glow (2024). In that bleak film, made while Schoenbrun was transitioning, schoolkids Maddy and Owen compulsively watch a schlocky TV horror serial, The Pink Opaque, until Maddy somehow disappears into it for years, leaving Owen, too frightened to follow her, with the agonising realisation that his whole life has been misplaced. It’s a powerful image of having wasted so much time in the wrong body and the cost of changing that.

Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma, by contrast, is a post-transition fiesta, about embracing queer sex, following your desire wherever it takes you: owning up and not having to dissociate yourself any more. Schoenbrun’s commitment to this may have particular origins but its relevance to the notorious sexual perplexities of Gen Z as a whole is only too apparent. And that really is quite the horror story.

Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma is in cinemas now

[Further reading: The last days of the Bourdain Bro]