Jane Schoenbrun's latest film, "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma," is described as a "sexy slasher fantasy" that uses a fictional slasher franchise set at a remote summer camp to explore themes of dissociation and pleasure. Schoenbrun, a 39-year-old trans filmmaker, stated the movie is about "learning how to have good sex," a skill they had to learn after years of being dissociative around sex pre-transition. The film, which won the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, is considered Schoenbrun's most mainstream project to date, featuring acclaimed actors like Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.
The movie centers on Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a hotshot indie director tasked with rebooting the "Camp Miasma" slasher series. Kris's journey involves meeting Billy (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive star of the original film, who now lives on the abandoned summer camp set where the original movies were filmed. What begins as an attempt to convince Billy to join the "requel" evolves into a deeper exploration of sex, death, empowerment, trauma, and healing, with sequences involving "seduction by dipping sauces" and non-teenage sex and death.
While fitting thematically with Schoenbrun's previous impressionistic horror films, "We're All Going to the World's Fair" (2021) and "I Saw the TV Glow" (2024), "Camp Miasma" offers a more campy, funny, and bloody narrative. The film, which premiered as the opening Un Certain Regard film at Cannes, was met with initial skepticism from major studios and distributors, with Schoenbrun noting that "Everyone except for Mubi passed on this movie." Despite this, Schoenbrun, feeling determined to prove doubters wrong, believes the movie will be a hit and highlights the challenges trans artists face in securing budgets in Hollywood.
The film playfully traces the cultural lifespan of the fictional "Camp Miasma" franchise, from commercial smash to problematic relic, before being revived by Kris. Gillian Anderson's character, Billy Preston, is portrayed as a Norma Desmond-type figure, retired and living in seclusion. The movie's murders are depicted as cartoonish, emphasizing that it's less a grisly slasher and more a "thoughtfully constructed fever dream" that delves into sex, titillation, and orgasm, using the killer's name, Little Death, as a nod to the French expression for orgasm. It continues Schoenbrun's exploration of transitioning through cinematic and pop cultural tools.
