For the past four years, I’ve been following the work of Jane Schoenbrun, whose low-budget indie films have irresistible premises. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a lonely teenager gets sucked into an ominous online game. I Saw the TV Glow is about two misfit high schoolers whose obsession with a TV drama has unsettling repercussions in adulthood.
Schoenbrun’s latest, the slasher pastiche Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, won the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. As of press time, see it at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier, Partizanfilm in Burlington and the Majestic 10 in Williston.
The deal
Young indie filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) has been hired by a Hollywood studio to revive a “zombie IP” — the Camp Miasma slasher series, featuring a transgender killer known as Little Death (Jack Haven). The execs hope that Kris, who uses she/they pronouns and is in a polyamorous queer relationship, has the “woke” credentials to remove any taint of hatred from their vintage property.
Kris travels to the Pacific Northwest to seek out Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who played the original Camp Miasma’s “final girl.” Having refused to participate in the sequels, Billy lives in seclusion, but Kris wants her to appear in the reboot.
Kris’ partner (Jasmin Savoy Brown), who jokingly compares Billy to faded star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, doesn’t know the half of it. Billy’s home turns out to be the abandoned summer camp where Camp Miasma was filmed, complete with a cinema where the projector is always threaded with her star turn. Serving Kris dinner, Billy solemnly informs her guest that Little Death is alive and well on the property.
The eccentric, turban-wearing actress is just kidding … or is she? As Kris ventures further into Billy’s private world, fact merges with fantasy.
Will you like it?
Let’s be clear: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is not a horror movie. In fact, it may be Schoenbrunww’s happiest, least dread-inducing film. Instead of the inventive kills prized by genre fans, it features purposefully absurd scenes in which blood gushes in geysers. We get to see 35mm scenes from the original Camp Miasma, and the movie’s opening credits tell the story of the series through wonderfully eloquent, period-accurate memorabilia. But simply re-creating the aesthetic of ’80s slashers isn’t the point. Schoenbrun’s focus is the people who love those movies — in all their problematic glory — and the strange reasons why they love them.
The backbone of Camp Miasma’s early scenes is parody of the most affectionate kind. Beloved comic actors Patrick Fischler of “Mad Men” and Kevin McDonald of “The Kids in the Hall” play stock characters, while aerial shots and title cards recall The Shining. But the movie soon veers way past parody into the realm of surrealism.
When Kris arrives in Billy’s domain, hand-painted matte backgrounds and obviously fake snow make it clear that Camp Miasma is less a place than a state of mind — playful, campy, dreamlike and shamelessly theatrical. Kris enters this otherworld as mousy and inhibited as any final girl character, but transformation is on the horizon.
While Camp Miasma is a feast for cinephiles, a grab bag of horror styles packed with throwaway jokes and eye candy (actual candy is a recurring motif), none of it would gel without Einbender and Anderson. (Amanda Fix also gives a haunting performance as the younger Billy.) Kris and Billy’s conversations simmer with chemistry: comedic, artistic, romantic, sexual. At first, Kris couches her admiration for the Camp Miasma franchise in prim, academic terms — “problematic,” “gender trouble.” Billy, who represents “big Gen X energy” (in Kris’s words), lights up a joint and nudges her younger guest toward being more real. When Kris finally reveals why the movies matter to her, the two have an explosive meeting of the minds (and other parts).
Viewers’ feelings about Camp Miasma may hinge on their reaction to a pivotal scene in which Kris and Billy explore their mutual erotic fixation on the slasher. That fixation rests on an almost mystical connection between the viewer, the killer and the final girl — something Carol J. Clover explored in her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the first influential work to suggest that slasher flicks weren’t pure misogyny. From such dry material, Schoenbrun crafts an unforgettable scene of imaginative reclamation, in which the stuff of nightmares becomes a source of power and pleasure.
Camp Miasma suggests a Gen Z take on The Rocky Horror Picture Show — a joyous tale of sexual liberation with the hoariest of horror backdrops. Schoenbrun celebrates the gothic ethos, in which the past dooms the present, while daring to propose that we might not be doomed after all. The movie defines “not for everyone,” but if horror is your love language, this Miasma could be hard to shake.
If you like this, try…
I Saw the TV Glow (2024; Kanopy, rentable): Darker and moodier than Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun’s previous film is a must for anyone who was ever unhealthily fixated on a paranormal TV series.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021; Kanopy, rentable): More dread-tinged character study than horror, the filmmaker’s minimalist breakout takes us inside the private world of a teen who self-soothes with ASMR videos before venturing into an occult online game.
Sleepaway Camp (1983; AMC+, Peacock, Pluto TV, PLEX, Prime Video, Roku Channel, Tubi, YouTube): The clear inspiration for Camp Miasma is this cult slasher series that notoriously features a killer with “gender trouble.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”
This article appears in August 26 • 2026.
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