{"id":1180074,"date":"2026-09-01T03:41:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T03:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1180074\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T03:41:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T03:41:28","slug":"review-of-the-week-teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1180074\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of the Week: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Photo: Mubi<\/p>\n

(15, 112 mins, in cinemas now)<\/p>\n

It was in 2021 that Jane Schoenbrun first emerged from behind their glowing laptop screen to deliver their eerie feature debut. We\u2019re All Going to the World’s Fair was a meta psychological chiller about a teenage girl who falls deep into an online role-playing game, and \u2013 like this year\u2019s indie horror hit Backrooms \u2013 it was inspired by the \u201ccreepypasta\u201d subculture of online urban legends. That film caught the attention of movie star Emma Stone, who produced Schoenbrun\u2019s neon-hued second feature, I Saw the TV Glow (2024). Now there\u2019s a third, which further builds on the film-maker\u2019s favourite themes of fan community, trans allegory and the power of pop-culture-mediated fantasy.<\/p>\n

Hannah Einbinder, the Emmy-winning Hacks star (and outspoken pro-Palestine activist), plays Kris Williams, a \u201cSundance wunderkind\u201d director who\u2019s been hired to reboot Camp Miasma, a long-dormant slasher franchise \u2013 think Halloween or Friday the 13th \u2013 about a group of teenagers stalked by \u201cLittle Death\u201d, the spear-wielding ghost of a bullied camper who now intermittently emerges from the bottom of Lake Miasma to wreak vengeance.<\/p>\n

Kris is aware of how her queer identity is being cynically used by the studio to launder the transphobic 80s original. (Like many horror classics, such as Silence of the Lambs or Psycho, it perpetuated the false idea of gender non-conformity as monstrous and murderous.) But she\u2019s also a true Camp Miasma fan, having once been a lonely kid who found solace there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cLittle Death\u201d in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Photo: Mubi<\/p>\n

Hoping to cast the first film\u2019s star, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), in her reboot, Kris treks out to the remote, abandoned summer camp, where the actress now resides, ever since her mysterious withdrawal from the film industry. Billy, in her grande dame turban, is more Norma Desmond than Norman Bates \u2013 although there\u2019s a touch of the latter too. \u201cSomebody\u2019s got to be here when Little Death comes back,\u201d she deadpans, when Kris questions her choice of home. She\u2019s joking, though \u2026 Right \u2026?<\/p>\n

If you couldn\u2019t tell, Jane Schoenbrun was also once that lonely, TV-obsessed kid. They\u2019ve spoken before in interviews about their childhood love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X Files, and how, as an 11-year-old, they once devoted an entire month to watching the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels back-to-back. Now they are themselves a Sundance wunderkind, with the necessary buzz to secure The X Files\u2019 Gillian Anderson for their slasher homage. So this film is unabashedly \u201cmeta\u201d, yes, but \u2013 unlike the Scream franchise, which Nightmare on Elm Street\u2019s Wes Craven helmed in the late 90s \u2013 there\u2019s nothing smugly self-referential about it. Instead, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma explores fan devotion at its most intensely earnest, <\/strong>to suggest that this is not necessarily the sign of a dangerously disassociated mind but \u2013 ultimately \u2013 a route to transcendence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u275d<\/p>\n

Gillian Anderson absolutely understood the assignment, as a long-acknowledged lesbian icon who\u2019s also just one of those people who everyone fancies: man, woman, dog or chair<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact that Schoenbrun is a real fan also means they\u2019re able to create a very plausible fictional franchise for Kris and Billy to drift happily into \u2013 complete with collectibles, behind-the-scenes scandals and scratchy VHS visuals. Yet they also retain enough directorial distance to appreciate the silly, saucy appeal of a shoddy slasher sequel. This Camp Miasma place is, after all, as camp as a row of temporary summer holiday cabins. The killer has been named in reference to la petite mort, the French euphemism for orgasm, and the film-within-a-film has killings which revel in the ridiculous gore of six-foot-high blood fountains and a severed head that exclaims \u201cBummer!\u201d as it rolls away.<\/p>\n

Gillian Anderson, for one, absolutely understood the assignment, as a long-acknowledged lesbian icon who\u2019s also just one of those people who everyone fancies: man, woman, dog or chair. Her performance leans into that persona by, for instance, announcing in Billy\u2019s over-ripe southern accent that they\u2019ll be dining on KFC that night (\u201cSpeaking of desire, do you like dipping sauce?\u201d), and then letting the eroticised fried-chicken finger-lickin\u2019 commence.<\/p>\n

Hannah Einbinder as Kris \u2013 and probably as Hannah too \u2013 is enjoying every moment and, as the two grow closer, Kris confides she can only enjoy sex by imagining herself the \u201cfinal girl\u201d heroine of a slasher flick. In this way the film calls to the surface \u2013 of Lake Miasma and our collective subconscious \u2013 the sex-death connection inherent to the genre. Billy encourages Kris to actualise her imaginings, to let her internal self live externally, all building to an ecstatic climax of \u201cflesh and fluid\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Photo: Mubi<\/p>\n

Fantastical perhaps, but possible. Indeed, by bringing together a cast including many non-binary and\/or queer talents to stage a frenzied, psychosexual, retro, lesbian meta-slasher, with surprising amounts of near-universal relevance, Schoenbrun has willed into reality a kind of cinema that probably only existed in their head before. It\u2019s film-making with the capacity to simultaneously enjoy our unexamined pleasures and examine their potential harm. What a wild, transformative summer we\u2019re having at Camp Miasma! I hope it never ends!<\/p>\n

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Ellen E Jones is the Nerve\u2019s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC\u2019s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild\u2019s Presenter of The Year, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Photo: Mubi (15, 112 mins,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1180075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3935],"tags":[2766,77,3943,285,53,16,15],"class_list":["post-1180074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-politics","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117193718643680788","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1180075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}