Blood, guts and gore. An unhinged serial killer invested with a supernatural level of homicidal malice. The obsessive eye of the camera constantly tracking the curves of nubile teen flesh in between, and sometimes during, episodes of slaughter. A final girl. All the tropes of your classic slasher flick show up in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” but if you were hoping for a historical reenactment of ’80s horror at movie theaters in 2026, you probably headed home to your mother’s basement with a sense of disappointment.
Writer and director Jane Schoenbrun (“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” “I Saw the TV Glow”) wants to please the audience – in fact, as the layers of filmic invention pile up and multiply, they seem desperate to – but they insist on taking the scenic route to the destination by bait-and-switching a slasher flick with an intergenerational queer love story.
Don’t tell me that the marketing and casting made it obvious what kind of film to expect. Tell it to the crew-cutted Gen X gentleman, seated alone in the corner of a local screening, who kept shushing all the gender-ambiguous couples and throuples surrounding him. Let it be known: He came to watch the movie, not to listen to your chatter.
No doubt that stars Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder appreciate his undivided attention. Anderson, who earned her fuck-you money as FBI agent Dana Scully, the level-headed yin to the alien-hunting yang of agent Fox Mulder on the ’90s hit “The X-Files,” finds herself in the enviable position of being able to choose the roles that interest her on stage and screen. In “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” she plays the character of Billy Presley, the original final girl from the fictional horror franchise “Camp Miasma,” around which Schoenbrun’s film revolves.
The plot picks up Billy’s story decades later. She has left acting, picked up abstract painting and relocated to the now-abandoned real-life Camp Miasma. In this woodsy retreat, she perfects her craft, smokes prodigious amounts of pot and does a good job of not being weirded out that she lives alone at a campground where scores of fictionalized murders were staged – including her own.
It’s a quirky and comedic part, which Anderson imbues with a quietly scene-stealing desperation, the kind of sadness that belongs to the autumn of life, when a significantly younger love (or lust) interest walks through the door. It’s worth underlining the point: She plays a leading role in a Hollywood film as a late middle-aged woman whose character looks her age and is still permitted to express her thoughts and feed her desires outside of the orbit of an alpha male protagonist. That’s rarer than a UFO sighting.
The significantly younger love interest is Kris, played by Hannah Einbinder, whom fans of the TV series “Hacks” will enjoy watching in a similar comedic sensibility and role.
In “Hacks,” Einbinder plays a writing talent on the rise in the entertainment industry who has hitched her wagon – sometimes emotionally, sometimes professionally – to an older, more accomplished if faded female star whose career she is helping to relaunch.
Einbinder operates in the same register as Kris in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” playing an up-and-coming queer director who has been asked to reboot a horror franchise to make it profitable and more palatable to a new generation of horror fans that might be turned off by the transphobic themes that inhabited the original series.
In other words, Kris is being paid to pinkwash a Hollywood property. That’s business as usual for her crass agent (Sarah Sherman) who’s constantly chiding her client over the phone to close the deal. But it’s a tough pill to swallow for Kris, a true artiste, who made her reputation with an arthouse remake of “Psycho” retold from the perspective of the shower curtain. Kris will agree to direct the reboot, if she gets to cast Billy as the no-longer nubile lead.
Is Kris simply staying true to her artistic vision for the reboot? Or giving the middle finger to male gaze that demands a younger heroine? Or, more selfishly, casting Billy to remain close to a woman that provides her with heady thrills and insights into (and escape out of) her own confused and repressed sexual nature?
Or is “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” itself a puppet show for director Schoenbrun’s own preoccupations? They are the up-and-coming director. They are the artist doing battle with heterodominant Hollywood norms. They are the one gripped by horror films since a young age. They are the one navigating a nonbinary life, in need of a sexual reawakening to complete the journey.
No less a director than Fellini claimed that all art is “autobiographical,” so there’s no shame in making a film about yourself. Just make it interesting. As we go further down the rabbit hole of Kris and Billy’s mutual erotic fascination, the meta hijinx of deconstructed horror tropes flash faster and brighter across the screen, as if Schoenbrun were worried that their baseline story was not, at bottom, interesting.
Hence, Schoenbrun closes “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” with a carnival of excess that needs to be experienced rather than described (okay, one description: slo-mo erect nipples), unfurling the slasher plot into dimensions where the retro kitsch of “Stranger Things” meets the surrealism of “Bugonia” or a Charlie Kaufman film. Is it interesting? Better question for Hollywood: Is it a money maker? Queer women are still in search of their “Brokeback Mountain.” I don’t think we’ve found it yet.
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. Starring Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven and Patrick Fischler. Running time: 112 minutes. Genres: Drama, Horror, Romance, Thriller. Rated R for bloody violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language.
