Women's Lifestyle August 6, 2026 0 Comments

Inside Camp Miasma: How Jane Schoenbrun Survived a Mind-Bending Journey of Terror and Ecstasy You Won’t Believe

Ever noticed how a truly great horror movie tickles that uncanny spot between dread and delight? It’s like your pulse races not just from fear but something a bit more… electrifying. Films like Scream and Texas Chainsaw Massacre have long served up that thrilling blend, making us cosy up to terror just to feel alive in our own skin. But what happens when that sensation turns from lurking undercurrents to full-on spotlight? Enter Jane Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma—a quirky, razor-sharp slasher comedy spotlighting a young queer filmmaker’s daring reboot of a cult horror classic. This isn’t just your run-of-the-mill scare fest; it’s an intimate exploration of desire, identity, and those shadowy parts of ourselves we often tuck away. Ready to dive into a film that wrestles with sex, fear, and the fierce thrill of being oneself? Let’s peel back the layers. LEARN MORE

5 min read

A good horror movie delights and torments at the same time. It’s that tingly, visceral feeling that has long lured audiences to the screen for movies like Scream and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, safely subjecting ourselves to terror in order to arouse something in our bodies. Director Jane Schoenbrun wrestles with this latent eroticism in their highly anticipated third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a slasher comedy following a young queer filmmaker as they try to reboot a cult horror franchise, out August 7.

The film follows Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a Sundance-darling-turned-franchise-director endeavoring to reboot the “Camp Miasma” film franchise, which (like Friday the 13th) follows a murderous entity named Little Death as it slaughters teen counselors at a sleepaway camp. Kris travels to an isolated compound to find Billy Presley, the film’s original final girl, who’s been hiding from the public eye since that first film. When Kris arrives, she discovers that Billy never left the story—literally, she lives on the campground where the original movie was filmed. What follows is a deeply original take on authorship, desire, and the parts of ourselves that we’re too afraid to tap into.

Schoenbrun, not unlike Kris, rose to prominence for Sundance hits: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), two indie horror movies exploring gender dysphoria and identity. This time, Schoenbrun decided to embrace joy, crafting a bizarre movie that’s “enjoyed best by a bunch of gay people being together, hooting and hollering,” they tell Bazaar shortly after the film’s premiere at NewFest in New York earlier this summer. Rather than mining otherness, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma revels in the pleasures of gender and sexuality.

A woman in a cream dress arranging candles and rose petals in a cozy, dimly lit room with a bed and decorated walls.

Mubi

“I understood that I was in a different place than the place I was in when I made my first two movies, which were movies about the very beginning stages of transition,” they say. “Those movies, as a result, are these wails—not the animal; I’m wailing into a void. When it came time to start thinking about Miasma, I thought, ‘I’m actually in a much better place. I don’t need to wail. I need to laugh and sigh.’”

The film begins by chronicling Kris’s struggles with reviving the “Camp Miasma” script, offering some humorous critiques of Hollywood’s current reboot obsession. But the story veers another direction when the filmmaker encounters Billy, whom Anderson imbues with the swagger and seduction of a 1940s Hollywood star. Kris decides to stay in the abandoned campground with the now-retired final girl, a sexually confident counterpoint to the clearly repressed and work-obsessed filmmaker. Eventually, we see Billy help Kris tap into her vulnerability—both in life and, eventually, sex.

“For the first time in my life, I was far enough into transition that I was starting to enjoy being myself, and a huge part of enjoying being yourself is feeling good in your body,” Schoenbrun says. “In my case, [that meant] learning how to have sex that wasn’t traumatic.”

Two women watching an event, one looking anxious and the other focused, with dramatic lighting in the background.

Mubi

While horror has long merged fear and arousal, Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death finally makes that conflation explicit, mining the ways the two are so often tied up in our psyches. Schoenbrun even refers to the film’s first major killing spree—or “blood ballet,” in their words—as its “first orgasm.” The aptly named Little Death, played by Jack Haven, emerges from the lake to slaughter the partying camp counselors, prancing and stabbing with unnerving merriment to Counting Crows’ “The Long December.” Despite the splattering blood and guts, you can’t help but relish the ecstasy of the experience with Little Death as he gleefully dances around the room.

To nail this delicate balance, Schoenbrun meticulously sourced inspiration from a wildly varied range of movies. They divided their visual research into two sections: “Flesh,” which featured a still from the erotic spy thriller Lust, Caution (2007) and other “sapphic tentpoles” of the arthouse canon; and “Fluids,” filled with images of gushing “blood and guts” (think Texas Chainsaw Massacre). So much of the movie draws from Schoenbrun’s personal cinephilia, underlining, once again, how they see media as a blueprint for the self.

That’s why Schoenbrun thought, “I need to do the I Saw the TV Glow shot” in Teenage Sex and Death. In one scene, we see a young Kris lit up by a television watching the in-universe “Camp Miasma” for the first time. It’s a critical scene, where Little Death slowly approaches young Billy’s character as she loses her virginity. Staring into the character’s eyes as she experiences both ecstasy and terror, Kris’s own desire is awakened. This moment is derived from the “Freudian concept of the primal scene—his name for the reality-crushing experience of witnessing sex before you know what sex is,” Schoenbrun explains. “Kris is seeing the things she’s not supposed to be seeing, and it’s imprinting on her forever in some way.”

A figure in a white suit holds a spear and has a box-shaped head, standing in a dark outdoor setting.

Mubi

Within its richly layered argument about the terror of truly surrendering to our erotic impulses, Teenage Sex and Death also has something to say about the safety required to get there. In the film, it’s illustrated most clearly in a scene where (serious spoiler alert!), Kris and Billy begin to have sex. Instead, Kris suffers a panic attack, so the two take a break to hang out and eat candy on the floor. As the “Camp Miasma” slogan goes: “If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.”

“The line is recontextualized throughout the movie,” Schoenbrun explains. “For me, it becomes a way to talk about consent and a way to talk about a thing that was really important to me as I was learning to feel comfortable in my skin—the vulnerable, scary, but enticing realm of sex and desire—which is like, I’m doing this with someone who I feel comfortable enough with that if I start to have a panic attack, I could just be like, ‘Hey, we gotta stop,’ and then we can eat gummy candy and start again.”

The climax of the film, so to speak, is when Kris and Billy finally have sex. In a fantastical parallel sequence, we see Kris running from Little Death through the campground. In reality, she is finally surrendering, overcoming the scary parts in order to reach the pleasure on the other side. When she orgasms, she is also being stabbed by Little Death, an exultant moment despite being a bit on-the-nose.

“Kris’s triumph at the end of the movie, when she’s able to come, is so hard-won,” Schoenbrun says. “It’s because it’s terrifying for her to push herself to that place with another person in the room, [it] requires giving in to something that feels really unsafe. Like a scary movie, this is going to feel unsafe, but it actually is safe.”