Euronews Culture Spotlights ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ as This Week’s Pick

“Sex appears effortless for many,” a budding filmmaker confides to her new lover, reclining half‑naked amid a scatter of candy wrappers. “Yet I can only reach that point with someone else when I let my mind wander far away.”

This moment exemplifies one of many striking scenes in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s delirious take on the slasher genre. It captures the film’s absurd yet intimate charm while reminding viewers that attaining its ecstatic core requires surrendering control.

The narrative follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), an emerging queer director who, after impressing indie studios with her debut feature (“Psycho — but told from the perspective of the shower curtain”), is handed the task of revitalising a dormant summer‑camp slasher franchise known as Camp Miasma.

Camp Miasma’s mythology is richly detailed, evident in a spectacular opening sequence that only a mind shaped by grainy VHS tapes and their underground fandoms could conjure.

Drawing inspiration from Friday the 13th, The Burning and, most notably, Sleepaway Camp, the fictional series centres on a masked killer dubbed Little Death (Jack Haven). Rising from a lake, he exacts vengeance on groups of promiscuous, mean‑spirited teens after being drowned for being raised as both boy and girl.

By 2026, this gender‑bending origin story has become “problematic,” yet it remains ripe for a progressive, “elevated horror” reboot—think externalised metaphors for generational trauma.

Kris, whose own sexual awakening occurred while watching the original film, harbours a different vision. She hopes to enlist the series’ original final girl—a turban‑wearing recluse named Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson). Billy’s thick Southern drawl and Norma Desmond‑like aura seem to ooze from the screen like sweet, sticky honey.

Billy still resides on the original camp’s grounds. As Kris steps onto the property, her familiar world dissolves into a libidinous lucid dream, a dissociative realm where media and reality blur, scenery turns into painted backdrops, and a casual fried‑ chicken dinner transforms into a sensuous montage of smacking lips and dipping sauce.

Schoenbrun exhibits a distinctive talent for this approach. Her earlier entries in the Screen Trilogy—We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow—likewise treat pop culture, media, and digital communities as transformative spaces: worlds within worlds that mirror our true selves like a psychological looking‑glass.

A recent horror, Backrooms, accomplishes a similar feat. However, while the liminal zones of that film serve as metaphors for negative thought patterns, the meanings in Camp Miasma resist simple condensation.

Perhaps that is the intention. Although the genre’s tropes—including its misogyny and transphobia—are presented with a meticulous layering of possible theories, Schoenbrun ultimately privileges feeling over analysis.

As Kris wrestles to balance her deep affinity for Camp Miasma with the shame she feels about its more troubling elements, Billy offers a reminder: “It wasn’t about cultural depictions of monstrosity or gender trouble or any of that stuff. It was about two very simple things—flesh and fluids.”

Within the space between their viewpoints lies a more complicated truth that resists easy intellectualisation. Billy and Kris’s relationship becomes an exemplar—not merely a love story, but a swirling, hallucinogenic embrace of animalistic urges and their contradictions.

In a particularly tense scene, implied to reveal that Billy suffered a sexual assault as a teenager, the mood abruptly shifts, melting into a montage of Little Death committing a violent massacre—heads and torsos pierced with comic‑book levels of blood splatter—set to the soundtrack of Counting Crows’ “A Long December.”

When the camera pulls back, we glimpse their eyes through a slit in the TV‑like helmet, the absurdity of the moment allowing a fleeting glimpse of something human once more.

Although these tonal and stylistic whiplashes can provoke a “what the hell?” reaction, they never feel jarring. Instead, they coalesce into a singular vision that feels both intensely personal to the director and strangely familiar—like peering into a stranger’s window and recognizing your own belongings inside.

“I liked the danger and powerlessness,” Billy tells Kris, describing what draws her to horror. “It’s giving in.”

In the same spirit, Camp Miasma invites the viewer to give in—to dash through the woods, bloodied and braless—because Little Death is approaching, and what else is a Final Girl to do?

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select European cinemas, with a staggered rollout across the continent throughout September.

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