‘Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma’: Fear and desire are potent bedfellows in Jane Schoenbrun’s twisty satire

Dir/scr: Jane Schoenbrun. US/Canada. 2026. 112mins

Sex and death have long gone hand-in-bloody-hand in slasher films, but Jane Schoenbrun takes the trope to audacious new extremes in Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma. Equally mocking, celebrating and paying tribute to the oft-derided genre, the I Saw The TV Glow writer-director fashions a twisty psychodrama out of a killer premise: a Sundance wunderkind is hired to reboot an ageing horror franchise, seeking out the reclusive actress who played the original final girl. A dizzyingly ambitious meta-satire about Hollywood, IP, hacky horror, and gender and sexual identity, Teenage Sex And Death cannot help but occasionally misstep, but the rush of ideas and the confidence of the filmmaking never waver.

 A dizzyingly ambitious meta-satire 

Schoenbrun makes their Cannes debut with Teenage Sex And Death, which opens Un Certain Regard before releasing in the US in early August through Mubi. Much like 2024’s I Saw The TV Glow, their new film taps into the joys and dangers of pop-culture worship, but this follow-up boasts the star power of Hacks star Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, which should help Teenage Sex And Death outperform I Saw The TV Glow’s $5.4 million worldwide gross. Very likely the picture’s knowing subversion of slasher cinema will play best with horror aficionados, setting the stage for cult-classic status.

After earning kudos for her super-indie breakout film, 29-year-old director Kris (Einbinder) has been tapped to revive the moribund Camp Miasma franchise, which has lost its allure thanks to endless bad sequels and remakes over several decades. A massive fan of the series, she decides she must cast Billy (Anderson), who was the iconic final girl from the 1990s original before abandoning the spotlight. Visiting Billy’s house deep in the snowy woods in the middle of nowhere, Kris tries to sell the actress on returning to the intellectual property that made her famous.

Teenage Sex And Death niftily captures the trashy aesthetic of bygone slasher films through Eric K. Yue’s intentionally low-grade cinematography and Alex G’s cheekily cheesy synth score. Schoenbrun shows us plenty of the original Camp Miasma — Amanda Fix plays Billy in these sequences — while also adorning the present-day story with the stylistic, sometimes campy trappings of no-budget horror. The effect is properly disorienting, making Kris’ quest to recruit Billy suitably treacherous as she simultaneously navigates the fraught landscape of nitwit Hollywood executives who want to ensure her Camp Miasma won’t be too artsy.

Einbinder envisions Kris as a pretentious, socially awkward lesbian who knows more about movies than real life. She’ll get an education from meeting Billy, who Anderson portrays with seductive eyes and an amusingly ludicrous Southern accent. Living on the former camp grounds where the original Camp Miasma was shot, the decidedly eccentric Billy enjoys teasing this younger woman regarding whether she’s a Norma Desmond-like diva who has lost her grip on sanity. At the same time, a growing attraction develops between them, their steamy courtship paired with the Camp Miasma franchise’s notorious history of kill scenes connected to nubile teenagers having sex. (That the killer is called ‘Little Death’ is no accident.)

Schoenbrun takes aim at myriad targets — including the film industry’s lazy tendency to reanimate so-called zombie IP — but Teenage Sex And Death is strongest when the writer-director investigates how horror impacts young, impressionable viewers, shaping (and, often, warping) their worldview in the process. Specifically, Schoenbrun measures the cost for someone like Kris, who possesses little understanding of sex, desire or relationships beyond what she’s encountered in slasher films. Ultimately, Teenage Sex And Death proves to be a kinky, hallucinatory coming-of-age journey for the budding auteur, with Billy as her eager sexual mentor.

Featuring references to The Shining, Psycho and Friday The 13th, the film also attempts to be a slasher film in its own right, albeit one whose copious gratuitous gore is designed to provoke laughs. But these sequences are less rewarding than the nervy psychological terror Schoenbrun mines as Kris begins to mentally unravel. Not unlike in their 2021 breakthrough We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, Schoenbrun here marvellously puts us into the fracturing mindset of their main character, who amidst horror’s obsession with sex and death wonders if there’s any room for something more.