Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a MUST WATCH for hardcore slasher fans
After watching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — a title that’s sure to be the bane of anybody who puts letters on theatrical marquees for a living — my initial reaction was “give Jane Schoenbrun the licenses to Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street AND Sleepaway Camp and hand them over RIGHT NOW.”
The opening title sequence of Camp Miasma ALONE is better than 95 percent of the horror movies we’ve gotten in 2026 so far. It’s an absolute genre fanatic love-in that manages to boil down the entire slasher movie canon into a four-minute multimedia jubilee of fake VHS cover art, non-existent Topps trading cards, faux arcade cabinets, make-believe action figures and a deluge of facsimiles of clickbait horror website articles bemoaning the entire sub-genre as “problematic” rubbish. It’s an amazing meta-montage that informs you from the outset that Jane knows their stuff when it comes to the slasher arts.
Somehow, the movie only manages to get better from there.
The movie is obviously a parody of the Friday the 13th mythos, down to having a central antagonist who arises from the depths of a lake to rain bloody death on anyone dumb enough to smoke weed and have premarital sex on his stomping grounds. Of course, instead of a hockey mask the franchise killer in the movie-within-a-movie Camp Miasma series sports a different kind of facial covering — an air conditioning vent. It looks cooler than it sounds, trust me.
You just assume the director behind I Saw The TV Glow is going to get all deconstructionist on us and while that is the case in Camp Miasma, it’s not exactly the barbed trope vivisection you might anticipate. Indeed, Schoenbrun (who also wrote the film) clearly has a passion and respect for the F13 lore and never aims for the low-hanging fruit. They never outright make fun of the source material and actually goes out of their way to paint it as deceptively perceptive form of low culture sleaze. Unlike so many meta slasher commentaries, Camp Miasma never makes fun of or criticizes the kinds of people who love stuff like Jason Lives or The Burning. Evidently, that’s because Jane is one of us.
Like Scream, Camp Miasma is a film firmly aware of its own heritage and lineage. A prominent plot point in the film clearly echoes Sleepaway Camp and there are numerous references to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Blumhouse Halloween trilogy. It’s a film that exists in our real world horror culture mixer, to the point Pamela Springsteen, Heather Langenkamp AND Felissa Rose all get name dropped in casual conversations. Yet nothing in Camp Miasma is ever fan service simply for the sake of being fan service. There’s real depth and nuance here, beginning with the outstanding performances from its two leads.
Camp Miasma may seem like an homage to all things F13 (and it is), but at heart, the two biggest cinematic influences on the film aren’t even horror movies — it’s Bergman’s Persona and Sunset Boulevard.
Hannah Einbinder of Hacks fame, plays Kris, a 29-year-old up-and-coming director who is chosen to reboot a long-dormant zombie IP about a campground slayer (sound familiar?) simply because she’s queer, poly and seems like the best filmmaker suited to address the franchise’s inherent homophobia and transphobia for modern audiences. She wants to bring back the star of the original Camp Miasma movie from the 1980s — Gillian Anderson as Billy Presley, in what could be a dark horse Oscar contender performance — but she’s a recluse that literally lives on the set of the aforementioned movie-within-a-movie. So Kris visits her in the middle of winter and tries to convince her to reprise her final girl role some 40 years after the fact.
It sounds like pretty rudimentary stuff, but you KNOW it’s not going to play out as plainly as it seems. Over the course of the film Billy slowly seduces Kris — physically, emotionally, and perhaps even spiritually — and then the surreality starts to creep in.
It’s hard to dig too deep into the waters here, since even giving away a light spoiler here and there kinda’ dislodges the big reveal at the very end. Let’s just say the realms of fantasy, reality and fantastical reality all get blurred, with everything taking on this phantasmic quality that could be a dream, could be a flashback, could be a hallucination and/or could be the unbelievable truth playing out in real time. It’s not as trippy as I Saw The TV Glow, but it’s not afraid to screw with your head. And it’ll definitely make you think twice the next time you see a still-functioning VCR player and a half-eaten pouch of Sour Patch Kids.
The reconstructions of the movie-within-a-movie are just delightful. Jane’s grasp of the aura and attitude of ‘80s slashers is so keen that you wish they’d let them direct a full spinoff. The director just plain gets the allure and appeal of the subgenre and never talks down to the audience. It’s a cheeky, funny, sardonic movie at times, but when it is it’s usually going after different kinds of targets — as in, studio execs who keep prattling on and on about the virtues of “legacy sequels” even though it’s obvious they have no idea what they’re talking about.
And we DO get a lot of stylized gore in this movie. I mean, it’s a loving ode to the first eight Friday the 13th movies, so it pretty much has to. There’s one particular kill that’s pretty much lifted straight out of Twitch of the Death Nerve and in a weird way, it seems to sum up the overarching theme of the movie as a whole — it is, if nothing else, a movie about finding comfort and intimacy in the damndest of places.
I really can’t extol Camp Miasma enough. When it’s time for me to do my top ten horror movies of ‘26 list, this thing is going to be VERY high on the countdown. It’s not just one of the best meta-slashers we’ve gotten this decade, it’s one of the best genuine slashers we’ve gotten in the 2020s. It’s a sincere, loving movie about a style of filmmaking that’s not even respected that much by hardcore horror cinephiles.
I mean, it’s a movie that has an all out massacre scored to “Long December” by Counting Crows. If that doesn’t scream “buy a movie ticker IMMEDIATELY,” what does?
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: KFC dipping sauces, age-gap sapphism, flesh and/or fluids
DIRECTOR: Jane Schoenbrun
WRITER: Jane Schoenbrun
STARRING: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler
STUDIO: Plan B Entertainment, Mubi
DISTRIBUTOR: Mubi
RUNTIME: 112 minutes
LANGUAGE: English
RELEASE DATE: August 07, 2026
