‘Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma’ movie review: Jane Schoenbrun’s erotic phantasmagoria finds the hole where the movies come from

At once a paean to the art of making movies and a metacinematic romp through the erotics of cinephilia, Jane Schoenbrun’s latest is a self-devouring triumph

Published - October 02, 2026 06:11 pm IST

A still from ‘Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma’ | Photo Credit: MUBI

Jane Schoenbrun has now made three films about people getting thoroughly and spectacularly mugged by the media they consume. Across their debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which left its protagonist stranded inside the dissociative sludge of internet horror, and the sophomore gut-punch I Saw the TV Glow, which turned estrangement from the body into one of the most agonising metaphors for gender dysphoria, Schoenbrun has established an unmistakably personal lineage. Now, their latest Cannes-winning Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma completes that unofficial media-nostalgia triptych.

So far, Schoenbrun’s films have luxuriated in the narcotic comforts of mediated worlds, in that forbidden little borderland where movies, television and the assorted digital flotsam of the internet become more intoxicating than ordinary life, especially when you encounter the right piece of fiction at the wrong age. Camp Miasma takes that distinctly Schoenbrun-ian preoccupation of being psychologically colonised by media and lets it loose from the cerebral confines of media theory, towards unbridled horniness. It is, in other words, a movie about cinephilia, i.e. that ancient and incurable affliction of wanting to have sex with a great film.

Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is a 29-year-old independent filmmaker who has been recruited by a studio to revive Camp Miasma, an ageing slasher property whose corpse has already been picked clean by sequels, merchandise and years of diminishing cultural relevance in the tradition of classics like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween. Kris is ostensibly being hired because her queer perspective can modernise the franchise and lend it contemporary credibility, which the studio hopes will make the old, problematic piece of intellectual property feel woke enough for a 21st-century moviegoer.

But Camp Miasma means a whole lot more for Kris than just a new gig. She has been devoted to the franchise since childhood, with a particular fascination for Squeak, the young camp counsellor played by Billy Presley in the original. Billy, now portrayed by Gillian Anderson, eventually abandoned acting after refusing to return for the disreputable sequels, retreating to the very location where the first Camp Miasma was filmed. Kris goes there to convince her to take part in the reboot, only for the professional errand to become something much more intimate as the two confront what the franchise has come to mean to each of them, emotionally and sexually.

Named after the French euphemism for orgasm, Little Death is the Camp Miasma franchise’s spear-wielding cryptid — a sexually vindictive apparition who spends its off-season in a hole at the bottom of the water, periodically surfacing to punish campers for the crime of getting laid. Schoenbrun uses the hole in the lake as a versatile metaphor for everything Kris has kept submerged, whether that is horniness, shame, fantasy, terror, artistic ambition, curiosity, the humiliating ache to belong, or all the other psychic junk she has accumulated from trying to intellectualise her desires. The hole is a vagina and a grave, an orgasm and an entrance, a portal into fantasy and a literal puncture in the membrane separating the Camp Miasma movie from the world producing it. It is also, somehow, just a hole in a lake through which a murderous freak occasionally comes climbing.

A still from ‘Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma’ | Photo Credit: MUBI

Little Death is an especially loaded piece of slasher iconography, because the character’s gender fluidity turns the monster’s genealogy into a little act of reclamation from a franchise history steeped in transphobia. Schoenbrun does not leave Little Death embalmed inside that old prejudice, either. Even the casting has a curious bit of recursiveness: Jack Haven, the trans actor from I Saw the TV Glow, plays the killer, so the performer who previously inhabited one of Schoenbrun’s most intimate stories about estrangement from the body now gets to crawl out of a lake as the very monster that slasher cinema once imagined trans people to be, only this time the monster gets to hunt down and murder the people who made a horror story out of its existence.