When asked about formative movie experiences, Jane Schoenbrun has spoken of the month spent watching all the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels at 11 years old. It’s tempting to say that the seeds of their latest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, were planted over those four weeks—not least New Nightmare, Wes Craven’s proto-Scream deconstruction of a genre he helped to build. But like most attempts to analyze this singular movie, Schoenbrun beats you to the punch.
That moment happens in Camp Miasma’s second act, during a conference call between Kris (a Sundance-garlanded indie director played by Hannah Einbinder), a chirpy publicist, a brash studio executive (Dylan Baker), and a woman whose name on the call is Queer Assistant. The conversation is set up as a progress report on Kris’ planned reimagining of Camp Miasma—a Friday the 13th-style ’80s franchise that’s long due for a reboot. The studio head, who drops Jason Blum’s name within seconds, is only interested in a safe bet, but Kris is determined to bring back Billy Presley (played brilliantly by Gillian Anderson), the original final girl (and the woman responsible for her queer awakening), in the lead.
That clash of niche obsessions and sexual realization was also a key theme of Schoenbrun’s last movie, I Saw the TV Glow, and there are moments in Camp Miasma that reach that movie’s bracingly original, darkly dizzying heights—the same ones that saw the filmmaker suggested in 2024 as a likely successor to David Lynch. Schoenbrun, who is non-binary, said that they wrote the script for TV Glow during the early days of their hormone replacement therapy and later confirmed that the movie was as much about their anxieties over being trapped in a previous life as it was about the grief of leaving that plane of existence. One of the things that sets the movies apart, and perhaps makes this one a little less interesting, is that Miasma doesn’t seem to have been spun from a similar moment of personal turmoil—if anything, it’s the work of an artist enjoying a period of joy and playful creativity.
Whether those contrasting energies of light and dark always blend in Camp Miasma, however, I’m not so sure. The story follows Einbinder’s initially insular filmmaker as she visits Presley’s home––what turns out to be the sleepaway camp where the first Miasma movie was filmed. En route, her polyamorous partner (Jasmin Savoy Brown), who is also in a relationship with a bisexual bro named Thor, suggests that Presley might have gone full Norma Desmond in the intervening years. True to this movie’s M.O., Anderson, after an early exchange involving KFC, does eventually don the Sunset Boulevard protagonist’s draped turban for a screening of the first Miasma in her home theater. As the two characters sit in close proximity (I’ll leave it up to you to work out who represents the director’s ego and id), Schoenbrun allows the tension to rise as they approach the scene when Presley’s character (played in the film within by Amanda Fix) loses her virginity, just as the creepy boy she’s with is impaled by the killer’s spear. This creature (whose hulking head appears to be modeled on the lens of an old movie camera) is known as Little Death—or La petite mort, as they say here in Cannes, the French term for post-coital oblivion.
If one were to sit and list every reference, they’d be here all day. Each of Schoenbrun’s protagonists so far (much like them) have been defined by their obsessions with underappreciated media—the type of people who burrow into the darkest corners of movies and TV shows to look for patterns and deeper meanings. This led Schoenbrun to create a fully realized, Buffy-like show for TV Glow called The Pink Opaque, and their latest similarly develops Miasma‘s lore in engrossing detail. Most of the groundwork for this is done in the movie’s bravura opening-credits sequence that shows the life cycle of a horror franchise from box office success and Bible-bashing controversy to shark-jumping merchandise, cultural death, nostalgic revival, and even revisionism via queer and feminist film theory. (As I’m sure registered Schoenbrun fan Richard Brody will soon note, there’s even a cute New Yorker cartoon.)
All that mesmerizing detail aside, following on from a generational arrival like TV Glow was never going to be easy, and as much as Camp Miasma pokes fun at the artistic-neutering that comes with success (and a studio paycheck), the movie is certainly not against playing to the gallery. This change of course is understandable, not least for a filmmaker who so plaintively poured their soul onto the screen with their previous work, but I’ll admit that Camp Miasma‘s more winking moments––boilerplate Cronenberg and Lynch references, a running gag with brand-name gummies, a mishmash of analog and hyperreal textures that don’t always gel––did more to break the movie’s spell than enhance it. When Schoenbrun does decide to stare back into the void, however, their ability to cast a dark spell on the viewer is surely unrivaled in contemporary cinema.
Shot masterfully by their regular cinematographer Eric Yue (Alex G also makes a welcome return as composer), the movie-within-the-movie’s formative kill scene is so mesmerizing that you’ll welcome Schoenbrun’s decision to play it again and again––all the better to get a feel for how Kris’ obsessions have led her to the movie’s climax, and perhaps her own. Yue and Schoenbrun’s approaches also perfectly align when capturing actresses’ faces, often in achingly beautiful close-ups that only occasionally allow for a flicker of menace. “There’s a hole at the bottom of the lake,” Billy explains to Kris in one of those moments, setting off a sequence that is quickly becoming Schoenbrun’s signature—that churning sense of movie spiraling a drain as it drags you down with it.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released on August 7 by MUBI.
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