No teens or Gen X icons were hurt in the making of this movie
dir: Jane Schoenbrun
2026
A film can be deeply serious about its subject matter, and still be quite silly. I don’t mean silly as a pejorative, exactly, just in the sense that something can be meaningful and absurdly funny, side by side.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma can be an intelligent and trenchant take on 80s slasher movies and the culture that generated them, yet another take on the psychoanalytical links between Eros and Thanatos (the sex drive and the drive towards death/annihilation), a catty satire on contemporary “Hollywood” and its drive towards deathlessly milking franchises until there’s nothing but dust, and a deeply personal evaluation of one’s own queer / trans awakening and search for sexual fulfilment, and a campy delight that revels in its own unreality. All at the same time.
It is, most of all, a film brought into being by film itself, by movies themselves, in the ways that the writer / director Jane Schoenbrun expresses through her stand-in Kris (the great Hannah Einbinder) that she sees herself created at least in part by the movies that she has loved or been affected by.
Not all of us had the luxury to be shaped by the films of Ozu, Tarkovsky, DeSica, Rossellini, Varda, Fellini etc. Most of us (of those of us who are film obsessives) were shaped by sometimes terrible movies that nonetheless shaped or warped some parts of our psyches when we watched something at way too young an age. Blue Velvet. Threads. Faces of Death. Vampyres. Straw Dogs. Deep Red. Alligator. Desolation Alley. Galaxy of Terror. Sometimes terrible, no-good flicks that still did something to some inappropriate part of you when they affected some part of your brain and body that you never knew were going to operate normally ever again. And logic and sense were never going to be able to get in the way to protect you, not for a long time.
Imagine, like the protagonist of this film, a writer / director commissioned to reboot a slasher franchise, that elements of how you feel about yourself, see yourself, experience your life, were also wrapped up in your experience of watching the first film in the franchise, being the (fictional) Camp Miasma. The flick itself is fictional (to us), which means it’s not based on a specific flick or slasher franchise, just many of them. So yes there’s Sleepaway Camp, but the Friday the 13ths are not far away from the subject material, or the presumed aesthetics.
So Kris, the director, is keenly aware of why the studio is hiring her to reboot this so-called ‘problematic’ franchise, seeing as a crucial aspect of the original was that the ‘villain’ is a trans person, and she is too. ‘They’ hope to cash in and avoid criticism about the intended flick also being labelled transphobic. She is being used to whitewash, or transwash the eventual product.
But she’s also keenly aware that there’s some combination of what she first saw in that film, in a crucial scene where the heroine (Amanda Fix), the so-called Final Girl, played eventually by Gillian Anderson, is having desultory sex with a guy, just as the Big Bad lopes into view, with an eye towards murdering them both, that informs Kris’s sense of self, her identity, as trans and queer. And while she can intellectualise those aspects of the experience, or what they mean cinematically, she is unable to transcend (pun intended) the intellectual in order to embody her own experience.
Kris is unable to enjoy sex, unable to allow herself to enjoy sex, but it’s not just Camp Miasma’s fault. If anything, it’s the cause of, and solution to, all of her life’s problems.
In wanting to scope out a location, Kris ends up at the original summer camp where the first movie was supposedly filmed, and wouldn’t you know it, Billy Preston, played just like the faded Southern belle you might imagine, is at the camp, as the living embodiment of camp. She greets Kris and offers her fried chicken, arch line deliveries and, eventually, dope to smoke. Kris fangirls out and necessarily acts anxious all over the place, and agrees to eat fried chicken with Billy, despite the fact that neither of them looks like they’ve eaten fried chicken in at least the last twenty years of their lives.
And I keep saying fried chicken, but it’s conspicuously KFC. The Colonel. The Dirty Bird. Why? I have no idea, just like all the references throughout the film to lollies and candy and all sorts of ultra-processed crap. I guess you crave that stuff when you’re a kid, because responsible parents are always keeping it out of your grasp For Your Own Good (and gorging on it themselves when you’re not looking). It’s the literal forbidden fruit, like sex itself, something we are told to be ashamed of, or the shame just comes naturally, but still desperately desire.
As well as the depictions of sex in the flick, it’s meant to be more than ‘just’ sex. The crucial moment the film keeps coming back to over and over again is a moment, a frozen frame, a shot of Billy’s eye, in which there is the reflection of the killer, known as Little Death (Jack Haven).
Little Death. Le petit mort. Air Vent Man. He wears a helmet that looks like an air vent, glaring out from within a sequence of concentric squares, wielding a brutal spear with which he impales his victims, killing the innocent and the guilty, breathing heavily, slaughtering indiscriminately, wanting to punish others for his own murder.
He dwells beneath the lake, in a hole beneath the lake, and comes out whenever the scent of desire, as in, when young virile people, bodies and the fluids they contain, come near the camp.
He is… not really that much like either Voorhees, mother or son from Friday the 13th or Michael Myers from Halloween, or Freddie or the other legion of killers, or Angela from Sleepaway Camp, but some unique agglomeration thereof. He also doesn’t really fit into the pattern of prurient, conservative cautionary tales against teenagers having too much fun that was rife in the time period, but that’s fine too. His purpose is to serve Jane Schoenbrun’s / Kris’s / Billy’s purposes, which is to give people release either from their sexual hangups or from this mortal coil, whichever.
The joke is early on that Billy is Norma Desmond / Gloria Swanson from Sunset Boulevard but while Anderson lays it on a bit thick, she’s not playing a deranged, delusional character. Every outlandish thing that she says about either life in general, the movies or Little Death ends up being completely accurate and true, at least as far as the movie is concerned. Her entire purpose, other than to look quite perplexed by Kris’s hyperverbal nature, is to guide her towards self-actualisation, which, I can assure you, was never the purpose of those horror movies either back then or now.
Of course this film is of a piece with Schoenbrun’s previous film, I Saw the TV Glow, they are certainly companion pieces, but they couldn’t be more different in terms of tone and realisation. Her previous film was somewhat suffused with a feeling of dread, as in, through depicting a life where someone is too afraid to admit to themselves as to who they really are, and too afraid, essentially, to transition, and the stunted life that leads to. Here the protagonist has transitioned, but isn’t brave enough (yet) on their own to allow themselves to enjoy sex without the guidance of an older, wiser lover.
And it sounds simple, but damn does it play out in a complicated fashion. It forced me to realise how complicated sex is for some people.
There are ways in which the script avoids anything close to subtext and just has nothing but text after text stating explicitly what each idea is and how it connects to any other idea, so there is no elegance, no ambiguity to how it’s eventually all stated and explained in ‘straight’ dialogue. So it’s not enough for a character to embody an idea or express something that might recall something else. Which is why we end up with characters saying explicitly “I was not enjoying the sex so I disassociated and then I could see myself through Little Death’s eyes and then I was scared that he was going to penetrate me and then I wanted to be the one doing the penetrating and then I wanted to run in the rain like the beautiful and nubile Final Girl with my tits bouncing and then I came” and it’s dialogue in a film that you watched in a cinema that you paid to be inside, in this the year 2026, and that’s okay. It’s all okay.
Why yes I am trying to express that it was an utterly bizarre experience for me, but not an unenjoyable one. I can’t pretend I have the lived experience either of these fictional characters or of the people who made the film, in order to appreciate it on a higher or a more personal, visceral level, either, but that’s fine too. I’ve never and will never travel the stars in spaceships or wander around Scotland in pre-history hunting Neanderthals either, but I can appreciate the filmmaking that has brought these experiences to my eyes and ears, mind and heart. Generally films that make the claim that art is a form of creation on a par with anything the Big Bang might have conjured would make me roll my eyes until I got a headache, but I get and respect where Schoenbrun is coming from in this flick, and I found the idea of Little Death waiting patiently in a little room beneath the lake (that looks awfully like an old Blockbuster), only to spring forth When the Time is Right and generate his own Camp Miasma movies over and over again is a novel one, if not a hilarious one.
What none of what I’ve been describing so far actually captures is how funny and intriguing the flick is. Sure, there are some moments that are overbaked, like having a character literally say “I feel like there’s about to be a jump scare” before a (very minor) jump scare is kinda chuckleworthy, but sometimes I do find it intriguing to see the insides of another person’s mind play themselves out through the things they create, and they’re doubly lucky when they have performers who are up to the task.
Of course Gillian Anderson is grand in this as she is in everything she does, but none of it would work if Hannah Einbinder wasn’t such a great performer. Most people would know her best for her work in Hacks, and so they should, but she’s equally great here playing a significantly different character. And yet she also shines at the goofy stuff as well.
Maybe it all falls apart in the end, as most flicks do, and maybe the ending is more perplexing than it has any right to be (why buy all that crap at the service station and then not take it with you, as you walk away, covered in blood, hand in hand, and what about the petrol?) Maybe the Billy Presley character feels slightly too good to be true, more Yoda than Yoda, less a character than just a plot device for Kris’s fulfilment (what about her fulfilment? Kris is one selfish lover, I’ll tell you that much for free). Maybe it’s all so surreal and artificial, and yet beautiful in its confection, that it has a limited audience appeal.
Still, I am impressed and somewhat amazed that it actually exists.
8 times no teenagers actually have sex or die in this film, which is a good thing, out of 10
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“Out here, being all alone, there are certain nights when you just get this feeling when it's really late and really quiet, when all of a sudden you just know that some psycho killer escaped mental patient is gonna break in and chop you up into a million little pieces. Oh, I like that feeling. I like the danger and the powerlessness. It's a giving in... even if it just lasts a moment.” - Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
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