Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
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The 39-year-old director Jane Schoenbrun has a wild imagination but a consistent theme: they're fascinated by the media obsessions that shaped some of us as young people, perhaps even offering us a sense of refuge and belonging that the outside world could not. Schoenbrun's 2021 debut, We're All Going to the World's Fair, was an eerie experimental horror film about a teenager caught up in an online role-playing game. Then came the 2024 drama I Saw the TV Glow, about two teens bonding over a Buffy-style TV series, which Schoenbrun, a transgender filmmaker, turned into a stealthy commentary on trans experience.
Now we have Schoenbrun's third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It draws its title from a fictional slasher movie called Camp Miasma, which was a big hit sometime in the 1980s and, like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and countless other horror touchstones of its era, has spawned an increasingly rudderless series of sequels. Schoenbrun recaps the history of the Camp Miasma franchise in a dazzlingly witty opening-credits sequence that I want to watch again slowly, one frame at a time: it's the work of an artist who knows how to spoof and embrace pop-cultural phenomena in astoundingly meticulous detail.
