Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review: A bloody and sensual visceral experience
Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder star in the buzzy film all the cool kids are already obsessing over.
Among the slate of premieres at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year were exciting new projects from respected European auteurs such as Cristian Mungiu, Lukas Dhont and Andrey Zvyagintsev.
But the movie that had the coolest anticipatory buzz came from not those established and serious filmmakers, but a relatively new American voice: Jane Schoenbrun.
Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, first gained attention with the 2021 horror We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, but then really broke through with the 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow. Both films were so specific in their style and emotions, and marked Schoenbrun as someone with a genuinely unique sensibility.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered out of competition at Cannes so it couldn’t win the Palme d’Or, but it was the one title that captured the zeitgeist out of the prestigious film festival. It was, they said, very good and, perhaps more importantly, very cool.
Cool, like all the bright young things are going to be into it, precisely because it’s not a cookie cutter movie you’ve seen a thousand times before.
Ironically, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma relies on a well-worn genre with recognisable tropes, the 1980s slasher movie, to craft a provocative, pleasurable and slyly funny queer comedy-drama that gushes blood and oozes sensuality, which are intrinsically linked.
As are the two characters – Kris (an excellent Hannah Einbinder), a young filmmaker who is hired to reboot an old horror franchise, and Billy (Gillian Anderson, every bit the goddess), the reclusive star of the original film.
Kris is obsessed with the old Camp Miasma films, which feature an otherworldly killer, Little Death, who has a vent for a head, and plods along, spearing its victims until their bodies give way to geysers of blood spurting into the air.
As research for her version of the film, Kris is intent on meeting Billy, who played the final girl in the first film and never returned for any of the many sequels. Billy now lives in the middle of the woods, at an abandoned summer camp that served as the filming location of the Camp Miasma movies.
With the affectations of Norma Desmond, Anderson’s Billy is a creature that doesn’t seem quite real. She has the perfect bouffant do of an old school Hollywood star and the luxurious threads to match, but serves a dinner of KFC drumsticks with dipping sauces.
Kris is taken by her, and acquiesces to stay the night at the snowed-in cabin with its projector and reels of Camp Miasma on film, which stops during a scene of sexual exploration. The two characters become entranced in each other’s presence as the legacy of Camp Miasma swirls around them.
The film melds desire with what conventional morality might class as forbidden horrors, but in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, there are no lines.
The boundaries between reality and unreality, art and pastiche, magnetism and repulsion, safety and violence all meld into a cinematic phantasmagoria in which nothing is ever certain.
The film doesn’t want you to methodically analyse every line of dialogue or image to discover its hidden meaning, but to accept it as a visceral experience that doesn’t need to be explained.
It’s far too imaginative to be boxed in, although it does have its own internal logic, and trying to figure it out would puncture its heady spell.
Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue exploits the visual language established by the likes of Friday the 13th, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, and uses it as both loving homage and as a plaything from which something different can emerge.
Those films followed strict rules of acceptable identity and puritanical American morality, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes those conventions and remixes it, just as an individual fan might with any single viewing.
Schoenbrun has often spoken of their cultural consumption growing up on genre movies and shows, and their films feel like a personal conversation they’re sharing on a collective scale through these distinctive stories.
It’s no wonder the cool kids love their work, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the most fun and accessible film they’ve made.
Rating: 4/5
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in cinemas on August 6
