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 us 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 trying 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.
“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 in 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.”
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 art-house 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.”
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens August 7.
