Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Review
We’re All Going to Camp Miasma.
There is a particular danger in making a horror film about loving horror films. Reverence can curdle into imitation, references can become substitutes for ideas, and nostalgia can leave a movie embalmed in the very past it wants to celebrate. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma understands that problem so thoroughly that it makes it part of the joke. Jane Schoenbrun’s latest is enamored with horror’s history but never beholden to it, a film simultaneously interested in what the genre has become and the disreputable pleasures from which it emerged. It is trashy, cerebral, horny, violent, funny, and strangely sincere. More importantly, it feels like Schoenbrun reaching their fullest form yet: an artist whose exhaustive knowledge of horror has become so instinctual that homage no longer requires imitation.
After We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun has established themself as one of contemporary horror’s most thoughtful interrogators of spectatorship. Their films have always been fascinated by what happens when media stops being something we watch and becomes something through which we understand ourselves. Camp Miasma pushes that fascination into more playful, unruly territory. Rather than treating horror as a distant object to be dissected, Schoenbrun jumps headfirst into its muck. Slashers, B-movies, exploitation pictures, campfire legends, cheap sequels, final girls, gratuitous sexuality, and gratuitous bloodshed are not embarrassing artifacts to be transcended. They are the foundation.
That makes the film’s self-awareness particularly satisfying. Camp Miasma knows it arrives during an era in which horror is constantly asked to justify itself through terminology like “elevated horror,” as though intelligence and trashiness have always existed at opposite ends of the genre. Schoenbrun toys with that impulse rather than simply rejecting it. The film wants to make sophisticated horror while simultaneously jabbing at the process of making horror sophisticated. It can examine the mechanics of a slasher and then surrender completely to them. It can question the final girl and still understand the visceral pleasure of watching one run screaming through the dark. It can intellectualize sex and violence while also admitting that sometimes sex and violence are the point.
There is something almost liberating about that refusal to clean horror up. Schoenbrun recognizes that the genre has never needed respectability to be meaningful. Horror's history is filled with sleaze, low budgets, sensationalism, practical gore, sexual panic, bad taste, and movies whose reputations were built precisely because they were too strange or vulgar to fit comfortably within respectable cinema. Camp Miasma doesn't reproduce those qualities as empty retro aesthetics. It asks what they can mean now.
That distinction keeps the film from disappearing into the increasingly oversaturated landscape of horror nostalgia. Schoenbrun clearly knows the canon inside and out, but the references never feel like a checklist designed to reward recognition. Their knowledge instead functions as a vocabulary. They understand why certain images, archetypes, and rhythms endure, and that understanding allows them to rearrange familiar components rather than merely recreate them. The result is a film that can evoke decades of slasher history without feeling trapped inside any one of them. Schoenbrun pays homage by interrogating, distorting, eroticizing, and occasionally ridiculing the objects of their admiration.
At the center of that balancing act are Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder, both of whom seem acutely aware of exactly what kind of movie they are in while refusing to reduce their characters to the joke. Their performances stretch across genres with remarkable ease. They can be seductive, absurd, threatening, vulnerable, and knowingly theatrical without ever breaking the film's internal reality. Schoenbrun gives them permission to perform at a heightened register, and both understand that camp only works when everyone involved takes the ridiculousness seriously.
Anderson, in particular, possesses the kind of screen presence that makes sensuality and menace feel nearly interchangeable, while Einbinder brings an elasticity that allows humor and terror to exist within the same gesture. Together, they become perfect scream queens precisely because neither performance is limited by what a scream queen is supposed to be. There is sexiness without reducing either character to an object and campiness without flattening them into caricatures. Both performances understand that horror has always allowed femininity, sexuality, fear, aggression, humor, and monstrosity to occupy the same body.
That fluidity extends beyond them. One of Camp Miasma's greatest pleasures is the breadth of people Schoenbrun allows into their horror playground. Gender, sexuality, desire, performance, victimhood, and power are never arranged into simple binaries. The genre's familiar archetypes remain recognizable, but Schoenbrun expands who is allowed to inhabit them and what those archetypes can contain. The film's inclusivity consequently feels less like an intervention imposed upon the slasher than an acknowledgment of something that has always existed beneath its surface: horror has historically attracted people who recognize themselves in transformation, outsiderness, performance, monstrosity, and survival.
Sex and violence become especially important within that framework. Schoenbrun understands their proximity in horror without treating either cheaply. Bodies are simultaneously desired and endangered, looked at and threatened, liberated and destroyed. The sensuality heightens the violence; the violence complicates the sensuality. Instead of apologizing for the genre's obsession with bodies, Camp Miasma makes that obsession one of its richest subjects.
Yet for all the intelligence operating beneath it, what makes the film work is its willingness to have fun. There is genuine affection in every scream, provocation, genre pivot, and knowingly excessive flourish. Schoenbrun doesn't stand above the movies they reference. They stand among them. Camp Miasma feels made by someone who has spent years thinking seriously about movies that were rarely afforded the dignity of being taken seriously, only to arrive at the conclusion that taking them seriously doesn't require sanding away everything vulgar, silly, sexy, or excessive about them.
That may be Schoenbrun's most exciting evolution as a filmmaker. Their intelligence has never been in question, but here it feels newly unrestrained. The cerebral and the visceral no longer need to compete. The film can be analytical without becoming sterile, nostalgic without becoming derivative, campy without becoming disposable, and sexy without losing its capacity to frighten. Schoenbrun's command of horror history gives them the confidence to push its boundaries because they understand exactly where those boundaries came from.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma ultimately feels like an act of pure admiration, not for some sanitized idea of horror as prestigious art, but for the whole unruly genre. It loves the masterpieces and the B-sides, the final girls and disposable victims, the screaming and the sex, the intellectual possibilities and the trash. Schoenbrun doesn't ask horror to become something better in order to deserve that love. They recognize that everything supposedly embarrassing about the genre is inseparable from what made so many of us adore it in the first place. In embracing that contradiction, they have made something that feels at once deeply familiar and genuinely new: a love letter written not from nostalgia, but from an understanding that the best way to honor horror's past is to keep finding new ways to make it bleed.
