Guilty pleasures must be on the mind of writer-director Jane Schoenbrun.
Their third and latest fictional feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, explores a long, dark embrace with a problematic fave: specifically, an ’80s cult slasher series titled Camp Miasma.
The Camp Miasma movies within Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma immediately register as a nod to several real horror series, following the timeworn trajectory of a popular low-budget beginning that devolves into shameless capitalist ephemera, over several decades of sequels, arcade games, action figures, and mail-order rap album tie-ins.
At the center is Sundance-sanctified indie director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), who describes Camp Miasma as “zombie IP”: the kind of intellectual property that studios aren’t sure how to revive but refuse to bury. The brand is too iconic to die and too outdated to really live.
Kris becomes acquainted with this undead dance, following her festival breakout, a retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but from the perspective of the shower curtain Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) pulls down as she’s infamously murdered. Kris has been hired to reboot Camp Miasma and help bring the series into the 21st century, so she pitches the studio a prequel, a particularly unique challenge for a young, queer filmmaker given that the original film has, to put it mildly, not aged well what-so-fucking-ever.
In the story within Camp Miasma, within Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a spear-wielding maniac called Little Death (get it?) mercilessly roams, masked by what looks to be a boxy air vent on his head. According to camp lore, Little Death was “forced” by his abusive parents to believe he was a boy on some days and a girl on others. Thus, when the kid went to a Pacific Northwest sleepover camp near the Canadian border—the titular Camp Miasma—he was immediately bullied so hard he drowned in the camp’s lake. Compelled by a warped gender-swapping psyche to rise from his watery grave (see: Jason in the Friday the 13th films), Little Death massacres a bunch of licentious teens, reducing their lithe bodies to improbable geysers of viscera, which Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric K. Yue capture with undeniable glee.
This kind of textual trans panic exists in plenty of real life cult films (many even adored by the queer community) and addressing the ludicrous narrative line connecting gender dysphoria to psychopathy seems to be much of the impetus behind Kris wanting to take the series on.
She’s also an obsessive fan, describing to studio execs how that first film transformed her from a kid who watched movies to an artist who wanted to make them. All that’s left is for her to meet Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive actress who played Camp Miasma’s first final girl… and who now lives in the abandoned camp where it was filmed 40-ish years ago.
Schoenbrun lays out much of this extensive background in just the opening credits, via newspaper headlines and vintage footage littering the screen, like familiar effluvium from another dimension. The context is easy to understand, because although the Camp Miasma movies are Schoenbrun’s fabrication, everything feels like intellectual property today. Everything: every book you’ve ever loved, TV show you’ve ever watched religiously, or board game that ever brought your family together—every facet of reality can be franchised until it is nothing but a nub of meaning.
As a filmmaker courting increasingly demanding studio budgets, Schoenbrun has every reason to want to let zombie IP like Camp Miasma die. Schoenbrun is trans, and so like many trans people in 2026, they must contend with a pop culture that is both inherently transphobic and foundationally responsible for their sensibility as an artist. The Sleepaway Camp (1983) series, Miasma’s most obvious inspiration, similarly began with transphobia—its big “twist” around the killer’s “identity” an upsetting reveal of full frontal nudity—and yet, like Kris, Schoenbrun clearly has a lot of affection for the film and for all the misogynistic horror fare churned out in its wake.
Throughout Schoenbrun’s films, pop culture is a conduit—a way directly into ourselves. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022) follows an isolated teen (Anna Cobb) who believes an online horror RPG is metamorphosing her into someone both frighteningly different from and more like herself than she’s ever felt before. In I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Owen (Justice Smith), another isolated teen, becomes obsessed with a paranormal syndicated TV show that cracks open his idea of who he is and what his body contains. The TV’s glow exposes Owen’s inner life like a tunnel into his chest.
If our psyches are byzantine HVAC systems, mazes of half-mapped ducts and grates and dead-ends, then your favorite piece of pop culture can lead you to who you really are. For Kris, that guilty pleasure takes the form of a psychopath who also has an air vent—a literal conduit—for a head.
Schoenbrun’s always been able to balance high-concept metatextual fantasia with deeply tactile, impressionistic filmmaking that’s in thrall to the influences they’re excavating. As Kris finds herself enchanted by, and then physically attracted to Billy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wanders further and further into cinematic artificiality. Courtney Stockstad’s art direction, replete with production design from Brandon Tonner-Conley and Matt Hyland, favors lavishly painted wintry backgrounds infused with a patina of ’80s cheese, both gorgeous and not real, like a Bob Ross piece writ large.
And Schoenbrun’s not interested in realism. About halfway through Teenage Sex and Death, Billy shows Kris her original print of the first Miasma film, and in turn we’re given access to the film—this film within a film—too. In one extended take, Little Death (Jack Haven) slaughters the entire camp staff while Counting Crows’ “A Long December” soundtracks every stabbing, evisceration, and delimbing. It’s a blissful bodymess of slapstick, flesh, and fluids that completely ignores how the movie was supposed to be filmed in the ’80s and the song came out in 1996. Anachronisms pile up, and Kris witnesses her adolescence folding in on itself in ways that only make sense in a movie. Things get significantly weirder from there.
The chemistry between Einbinder and Anderson seems to liberate the actors. With Billy, Kris begins to truly understand why she was drawn to the Miasma films, and in that understanding, she finds not just an awakening to her sexuality, but an explosively carnal demonstration of the real power of pop culture. It can define us as much as we can define it, despite capitalism’s insistence on defining it all for us. Rolling around in the blood and guts of our guilty pleasures, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is one of the most rapturous films I’ve seen this year.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens at Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy, Thurs Aug 13 and Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st, Fri Aug 14, 112 minutes, rated R.
