Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – title of the year, right? Film of the year maybe not. Jane Schoenbrun – metatextuality on legs – heads again for the horror movie, which has been meta-d so often already that you’ve got to wonder if there’s anything left to exploit. Don’t get me wrong, this film is a cracker – and both stars, Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, throw themselves into it with a commitment that borders on lunacy.
Schoenbrun says it’s influenced by Masaki Kobayashi’s supernatural horror from 1964, Kwaidan, which I’ve not seen. But I have seen the eeeny-weeny-budget New Zealand shocker I Survived a Zombie Holocaust, about real zombies arriving on a horror-movie film set, and thought some of its perversity pervaded this extrapolated gore-and-giggles study in camp-horror knowingness.
Einbinder plays Kris, the young director suddenly hoiked out of obscurity to revive the moribund Camp Miasma horror franchise (think Scream), whose reclusive star, Billy (Anderson) now lives in the abandoned sleepaway camp where the original Camp Miasma was made. Referential enough already.
When Kris arrives at the remote site, she finds Billy a strange yet welcoming hostess, half Count Dracula, half Norma Desmond, half Blanche Du Bois – it’s a 150% sort of film.
“My work explores the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” Kris tells the flirtatious Billy over fried chicken, and as the pair of them make vaguely queer eyes at each other while discussing the importance of dipping sauce, Schoenbrun gives us another nudge.
Einbinder, if you only know her from Hacks, is essentially playing the same role – the “voice of a generation” hired to zhuzh up tired IP. As for Anderson, her range seems to have no limit. The two work brilliantly together.
Kris is probably a stand-in for Schoenbrun, whose work has tended to explore the aforementioned intersections. Her work to date at any rate – from her debut A Self-Induced Hallucination, made when Jane went by Dan. Her/his/their (don’t shoot me) follow-ups – We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (also about the tension between online and offline realms) and I Saw the TV Glow (modern media as a prison).
Here the tension is between Kris’s academic take on horror – she’s undoubtedly read Carol J Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws and can tell you which chapter explores the notion of the Final Girl – and Billy’s more visceral “flesh and fluids” take.
In the same way that I Saw the TV Glow allowed Schoenbrun to poke gentle fun at shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this time around she tickles mainstream horror in recreations of the original Camp Miasma – geeky girl with a pash for a hot boy… a gas station where the pump jockey tells the kids they’re all doomed… a camp fire… making out… whammo…
Talking of flesh and fluids, Schoenbrun also tackles the conflation of sex and death in the American horror movie. The fact that Camp Miasma’s Freddie, or Leatherface, is called Little Death – in French Petit Mort means orgasm – is surely barking up that tree. The fact that Little Death (played by Jack Haven) is a boy who’s been raised as a girl on some days, and that Kris and Billy are both more often man’s names, that Jane used to be Dan, this is all grist to the metatextual, pan-trans-academic mill. Ragebait ahoy.
If it’s all sounding a bit too intellectual, Schoenbrun clearly thinks so too and at certain points Einbinder is undressed and forced to run around, breasts trampolining in slo-mo, as Kris is pursued by ghastliness through woods lit the way they should be – hard and low. At other moments there are spectacular gushers of blood and death most gruesomely florid.
Sex and death, real and fiction, young actor and older one, killer and victim, active and passive, whatever the opposition is, Schoenbrun wants to make the polarity fuzzy, difficult. David Cronenberg, Wes Craven and Alfred Hitchcock have been here before, of course, which is really my only criticism – it’s not the first time.
For all its meta-musings, this is Schoenbrun’s most obviously Hollywood movie to date. It’s vastly entertaining, a bit stonerish, quite funny, with a playful jab at Hollywood’s exploitation of aged IP in the most unimaginative way possible (the “reboot”). Here, Schoenbrun appears to be saying, is how you do it.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
