Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to see yourself through someone else’s eyes? To become both observer and observed, especially when the thing looking back at you wants to chop you up into a million little pieces. Literally. How would you react to what you see? This question sits at the center of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a sexy, strange, and deeply queer slasher that uses horror not simply as genre, but as a language for desire, dysphoria, and transformation.
Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker preparing to resurrect the long dead Camp Miasma franchise, a series that feels somewhere between Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp. Her obsession with the original leads her to Billy (Gillian Anderson), the franchise’s former scream queen, now living in seclusion at the old Camp Tivoli grounds where the films were made Kris arrives looking for inspiration. Instead, she finds a place where fiction and desire bleed together. Billy remains fixated on Little Death, the franchise’s masked, spear-wielding killer who supposedly emerges from the lake. She speaks of the character with such conviction that Kris’ certainty about what is and isn’t real begins to unravel. More importantly, both women watch the original Camp Miasma through radically different emotional lenses. Kris sees lust, a sense of freedom even, where Billy sees something closer to pain and stagnation.
That difference is where Schoenbrun finds the film’s emotional center.
I could go on with the synopsis, but it would ruin things. This is one of those films that must be experienced to understand, which is a part of the thematics of the movie. Schoenbrun is always looking to examine different facets of queer awakening, and the terrifying gap between who we are and who we are expected to be. In Camp Miasma that idea becomes inseparable from the slasher itself. Little Death can be read as the pressure of heteronormativity, the thing stalking these characters, forcing them toward a prescribed identity, sexuality, or “place.” Repeated phrases such as “this is your place” take on increasingly complicated meanings. A place can be safe. It can also be confinement.
Kris’ fixation on young Billy (Amanda Fix), particularly during an intimate scene from the original film, carries a charge of recognition and longing. Billy, meanwhile, watches that same footage as though witnessing a version of herself she can’t comfortably inhabit. Schoenbrun understands that sex can be erotic and horrifying at the same time when a person feels estranged from their own body and identity.
Even the mundane becomes charged. Fast food, dipping sauce, casual conversations, it all becomes uncanny valley thanks to Schoenbrun’s ability to make ordinary objects feel ominous, or intimate. The dialogue is similarly weird, operating in a way that feels neither entirely realistic nor fantastical. That liminal quality is intentional. These characters seem suspended somewhere between performance and self-discovery. Purgatory and reality.
Eric K. Yue’s cinematography reinforces that instability, while Schoenbrun’s direction remains remarkably precise. Very little feels accidental. The performances, compositions, pauses, and recurring visual motifs all seem engineered toward the same emotional destination. Gillian Anderson is particularly effective as Billy, playing her not simply as a faded horror icon but as someone haunted by the image of who she once was. Einbinder’s Kris provides a compelling generational counterpoint: someone looking toward that image with fascination rather than regret.
The film’s most intriguing device allows characters to see themselves through Little Death’s perspective. It turns the killer’s gaze into a form of introspection. What would happen if you could step outside yourself and truly examine the person you’ve become? Would you recognize them? Would you want to return? That idea pushes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma beyond its slasher framework. Transformation always requires loss. Sometimes becoming who you are means allowing the old version of yourself to die.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is ultimately less interested in escaping the killer than in asking whether we are brave enough to stop performing the version of ourselves everyone else expects to see.
