Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun makes movies about people being subsumed by media. They’re hypnotized by it, obsessed with it, so absorbed in its details and inner workings that it eventually swallows them whole. In 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a lonely girl tumbles down a destructive internet rabbit hole. In 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, a supernatural soap opera scrambles the identities of two alienated suburban teens.
And now those movies form a thematic trilogy with Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, about a filmmaker who immerses herself in a long-dead slasher movie franchise and finds an unlikely sexual awakening amidst impalings, beheadings and disembowelments.
Schoenbrun is trans, nonbinary and polyamorous, and their films are grappling with the ways art imposes ideas of sexuality and gender onto us. But if those earlier movies were about losing human connection and characters suppressing their true selves, here Schoenbrun finds some hope within the horrors.
Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an indie director who’s set to revive a once-popular, Friday the 13th-esque series called Camp Miasma, about teenagers who are stalked by a masked, spear-wielding killer known as Little Death. Kris’s big idea is to bring back the actress who played the original film’s final girl — Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who has become a recluse in the 40 years since, living in the abandoned summer camp where the first Camp Miasma was filmed.
Kris treks into the Pacific Northwest wilderness to sell Billy on her idea. Her Camp Miasma will be sophisticated and self-reflexive, both a loving homage and a head-on rebuke of the misogyny and homophobia present in ’80s slashers. Kris, despite being surrounded by reminders of her cinematic past, hasn’t given these themes much thought. She’s more intrigued by Kris’s personal hang-ups than her artistic vision, and soon they disappear into the lore of a series that has ensnared them both.
Schoenbrun’s screenplay is loaded with inside baseball terminology and easter eggs strictly for other horror nerds. It’s a self-referential movie about a self-referential movie, jokey post-Scream postmodernism filtered through an academic’s jaundiced eye. The first hour or so felt, to me, overly studied and overengineered, its knowing dialogue underlined in red. It plays like a dissertation on someone else’s dissertation.
But once the fog of cleverness cleared, the second half of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma started to work on me. That has to do with the two stars, who are alone together for much of the film. It’s great to see Anderson again, who has a seductive weirdness that pulls us into the screen. Einbinder is best known for the sitcom Hacks, where she’s also a young artist with an older female mentor, and she’s charmingly eccentric in her obsessions.
Kris and Billy both realize that their very beings are inextricably linked to the Camp Miasma franchise, and the film becomes about the thin line between fear and desire, about the formative, sometimes contradictory relationships we develop with the art we love. It’s about finding something profound in a work that had no such profundities on its mind, seeing yourself reflected back in something that wasn’t thinking about you at all.