You are what you like. What you like is horror movies. You are horror movies. Horror provides a wide genre bucket and easy metaphor, which Jane Schoenbrun folds into a coming-of-age story in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Schoenbrun’s filmography reflects their philosophy about what our engagement with horror means about who we become through experiencing it, using and adding to the cinematic language of transness to capture a specific point of view. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022) is about the cognitive dissonance and dissociation that come when we try to form our identity in online horror communities. I Saw the TV Glow (2024) ingeniously conveys what happens when we shape our identity around horror media and then maybe our newly worn identity is only accepted within the confines of those communal spaces. Completing the identity-horror triptych is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which explores sexual awakening and the Becoming of Self, as tied to our relationship with the classic horror films we are shaped by in our youth.
Kris (Hannah Einbinder, generous and nubile, “don’t forget nubile”) is a horror-obsessed filmmaker handed the Camp Miasma franchise, a fictional ’80s slasher worn down by years of lazy sequels. Determined to reboot it right, she tracks down Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s reclusive final girl, who still resides on the mountainous lakeside grounds where the first movie was shot. What begins as a casting pitch turns into an emotional and sexual bond between the two women, one that opens Kris up in ways she never anticipated, just as Little Death returns to the camp.
Camp Miasma doesn’t move like most horror films. Instead of aligning us with either the victim or the killer, it draws us closer to the thing we’re watching, placing us in the cathartic space that genre films have always invited us into. Its slasher archetype works the same way. Little Death (Jack Haven) isn’t simply a force of evil or an agent of social retribution but a proxy for something larger. The name plays on “la petite mort,” the French expression for orgasm, and the character comes to embody the thin line between ecstatic release and the awareness of our own mortality. Without giving too much away, the film builds toward a point where the final girl’s terror and pleasure become indistinguishable, and surrendering to Little Death plays as release rather than punishment. That’s the film’s thesis… the scream and the moan as the same sound.
Delightful artistry is key to Schoenbrun’s vision. Glorious painted backdrops and 35mm footage shot in muddy, washed-out textures blend into a fantastical and otherworldly rendering of the Pacific Northwest. Cinematographer Eric K. Yue, returning from the gorgeously shot TV Glow, has an expert grasp on translating Schoenbrun’s concepts into striking visual language.
There is a strong sense of academic autofiction about Camp Miasma. Kris, who approaches horror through a queer academic lens and wants to correct the original film’s reputation for transphobia, reads as an analogue for Schoenbrun making this very film. As a meta exploration, Miasma considers what it means to make horror, but more importantly what it means to live through it, vicariously experiencing a personal awakening by watching and then making horror central to one’s lived experience. Billy keeps telling Kris to stop over-intellectualizing, and the film seems to know that advice applies to itself too.
Camp Miasma is also about the machinations of the industry, who gets to make what, and why. We are in a new phase of emergent generational voices who are making films which reflect the modern context of use for movies as a whole. Movies are personal now. You can have them wherever you go. You can take them with you. You can summon an entire horror franchise from any device, and you can also seek out indie voices saying something new. Kris’ reboot sits right in that tension, an indie voice handed a tired studio franchise that is only really alive inside of her, and the film reflects both modern outcomes.
Einbinder gives Kris a nervy, overthinking earnestness that slowly loosens as the film goes on, and Anderson is having a ball, all Southern drawl and Old Hollywood glamour, a mature Norma Desmond type played with a real lived-in sense of sensuality. Camp Miasma won’t work for everyone — its dream logic and ethereal subtext may not mean the same thing for any one viewer — yet for anyone who grew up on horror, it’s a generous, strange, and deeply personal film. It’s Schoenbrun’s most heady, thoughtful, and searching yet.
You are what you like. Sometimes it just takes a Little Death to find out what that means.