In 2024, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun released their experimental coming-of-age story I Saw the TV Glow, about gender dysphoria and transgender awakening. The film starred Jack Haven, who returns as the air-vent killer Little Death in Schoenbrun’s follow-up feature, the slasher horror Teenage Sex & Death Camp Miasma.
At the center is the fictional slasher Camp Miasma, a classic horror pop sensation in the 80’s that gradually became a flop. Years later, Twenty-nine-year-old queer filmmaker, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is tasked with revisiting Camp Miasma and creating an “elevated,” or “woke,” reimagined reboot.
The origin story takes place at Camp Tivol, where a tragic tale is told of a young child with hermaphroditus parents; raising them to present as different genders every week. Taunted and bullied by their peers for living outside societal gender norms, he ultimately is drowned in the camp’s lake and Little Death is birthed. A hole sinks into the bottom of the lake, where Little Death resides. Little Death periodically rises from the depths wearing a distinctive mask, modeled after an air-conditioning ventilation shaft, and wielding a spear or harpoon to slaughter teenagers and camp counselors as an act of vengeance.
The cult-classic horror franchise is problematic, and the studio thinks it can simply dust it off in a “zombie IP resurrecting.” Kris is essentially “graced with the keys to the franchise,” while admitting that she is aware of the transphobia represented in the original and the studio’s strategy of hiring a “queer person to glaze over the transphobia.” Kris’ mission is to push a narrative about the “cultural depiction of monstrosity,” but Billy insists the film is not that deep. Instead, it became a cultural phenomenon because it was a film about “flesh and fluids.”“
Little Death comes back from the bottom of the lake, where the movies live, just like in the movies—he always comes back,” says Billy, the final girl of the first film, played by Gillian Anderson. Kris meets Billy for a meeting at the abandoned Camp Tivol, where Billy now lives after purchasing it and turning it into her “private escapism and coincidental destination.” The two quickly form a close-knit bond, and the meeting becomes more than a working relationship. Together, they eat fried chicken, smoke weed, and discuss art-making.
During an intimate conversation, Kris opens up about being in a polyamorous relationship. Yet love and romance remain strangers to her, while work is her “primary partner.” She uses her art as a shield to hide behind, creating her own alternate universe as a form of escapism. For everyone else, especially in the movies we watch and the songs we listen to, sex seems “so natural and easy” For Kris, it is anything but. “I’m so bad at sex,” she confesses.
She copes by dissociating, going “far away and somewhere else in my head.” She shamefully expresses, “Camp Miasma or an old film, I imagine myself becoming someone in a slasher film.” Her concealed kink is rooted in transformation and becoming, and she is aroused by the concept of being chased by a masked murderer, imagining herself running for her life.
Billy confesses that she deeply resonates with this sentiment and faced “complications with sex growing up,” particularly while shooting an intimate scene in Camp Miasma. Her first sexual encounter with a man left her with a sticky residue of hollowness, and she too found herself going “far away” and trying to become someone else. That is until she recalls experiencing an orgasmic high unlike anything she had felt before when she daydreamed about Little Death.
Kris becomes deeply infatuated with this 60-year-old woman who has been stored away from society, living at the camp as a lover of cinema and a painter. Despite the loneliness she sometimes feels, her solitude brings her serenity. Billy becomes convinced that she is undoubtedly the star of the Camp Miasma reboot and runs to report the news to her agent (Sarah Sherman). Kris’ agent is baffled. To her, Billy is a 60-year-old, aged-out movie star without a Wikipedia profile—not even the Jamie Lee Curtis of Halloween
In stir of the heightened intimacy of their connection, a romantic tension gradually surfaces between the two. “Let’s do it, let’s make a movie,” Billy tells Kris, collapsing the boundaries between creative collaboration, desire and performance. As Billy fixates on Little Death, gazing into his eyes while the two grow increasingly intimate, the film begins to suggest that cinema itself can become a conduit for erotic fantasy.
Schoenbrun is particularly fascinated by the movies we inherit and the ways they can become entangled with our earliest understandings of sex, fear and desire. “I think I saw too many slasher films as a kid and it f’d me up, real bad,” Kris admits. In Camp Miasma, the slasher becomes an unlikely allegory for sexual awakening: the descent into the lake, the emergence of Little Death and the act of being pursued all take on an erotic dimension. “Rise, awake,” and so he is risen; the monster’s resurrection and signals a simultaneous awakening of the body and its desires.
“It’s not a movie, this is a movie. You all are the characters. The hole was there before movies and Little Death is down the hole waiting. He does not need a mask or clothes,” Kris says. Little Death ultimately embodies the film’s most provocative intersection of adolescent trauma, gender fluidity and sexual awakening. He exists simultaneously as monster and victim, object of fear and object of desire. Schoenbrun turns the conventional slasher gaze back onto the audience: We believe we are watching Little Death, when in fact, Little Death has been watching us.
That thematic complexity is matched by Schoenbrun’s distinctive visual language, which recalls the dreamlike beauty of I Saw the TV Glow. The atmospheric landscapes unfold like moving paintings, echoing the artwork Billy creates and giving the abandoned camp an almost otherworldly quality. At the same time, Schoenbrun embraces the lurid pleasures of ’80s slasher cinema, reveling in blood, guts and deliberately exaggerated kills that veer into the cartoonish.
Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma is an intentionally strange and elusive cinematic experience, one that uses the familiar machinery of the slasher to probe the murkier territory of intimacy, sexuality and identity.A movie about a movie is almost always a recipe for cinematic brilliance and Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma is no exception.
CHRISKRATING★★★★
