You can’t accuse Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma of doing too little. Like its delightfully chock-full title—hereafter Teenage Sex and Death so as not to be confused with the movie-within-the-movie, Camp Miasma—Teenage Sex and Death is jam-packed with love and adoration, life and fantasy, art and commerce, and, naturally, sex and death. Even the opening, which recaps an entire 30-plus-year slasher film franchise cycle, from groundbreaking game changer to ouroboros self-parody, does so with humor and a sharp eye for why these pieces of pop ephemera connect, then fly far afield, only to come back around because there’s still viability in the core idea.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death is a little bit David Lynch, a little bit Sunset Boulevard, a whole lot of 1980s slasher flicks, and a sexual awakening allegory where the serial killer, Little Death, knowingly winks at the one thing that’s missing from the main character’s everyday life.

That character is Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer filmmaker who went movie mad as an 8-year-old girl when she procured a VHS copy of Camp Miasma, the first installment in a popular sleepaway camp slasher franchise. The dye was cast early with this one.

Kris became a filmmaker—her debut was a remake of Psycho from the shower curtain’s perspective—but she’s not in love with the work she produces. She’s in love with the artifacts that drive her work. Strictly in an intellectual sense, of course. Kris is trying to distance herself from the messiness of emotions and desire, despite her attraction to things that are nothing if not slippery with mess and loaded with desire. “Yet my experience of Deep Throat was not uninteresting,” Larry McMurtry once wrote of watching the famous 1972 porno flick. I imagine Kris’ diary contains similarly cool entries.

But desires can only be suppressed so long, and you can bet Kris’ is about to burst. When she explains her polyamorous relationship, you don’t have to fill in too many gaps to know some of the polys are having a hell of a lot more fun than Kris is.

Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) knows, and she just met Kris. Billy was the star of the first Camp Miasma and has since slunk back into the shadows. The studio that owns Camp Miasma has tasked Kris with rebooting the franchise with a woke shine, and Kris’ answer is to bring back the series’ original final girl. And where does Kris find Billy? Living Norma Desmond-style in the very location where Camp Miasma was filmed in the Pacific Northwest—probably down the street from Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

There is so much going on in Teenage Sex and Death, from astute observations about what movies get financed and why audiences get so turned on by them despite their assembly-line production to the plethora of cinematic in-jokes and references, that show Schoenbrun hasn’t just done the homework; Schoenbrun lives with it. You could build a weekend film series from these cinematic touchstones—particularly how Teenage Sex and Death builds on Peeping Tom’s notion of watching, being watched, and penetration, all rolled into one.

What comes across strongest in Schoenbrun’s film is a sense of how movies create our desires, suppress them, and release them—all within a 90- to 120-minute runtime. As Kris tries to explain the tangled nature of Camp Miasma’s misogyny and transphobia, Billy coolly reminds her that the movies were about two things: fluids and flesh. Schoenbrun gives us both in Teenage Sex and Death as limbs are severed and blood erupts like geysers, and how the threat of death, even those little deaths, arouses and excites. That coming of age is also coming to terms with all those sticky desires you’ve been squelching for years. And how freeing it is to let those inhibitions run wild. Some fantasies are just too good to leave dormant. What fun Schoenbrun has letting them out.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
Produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner
Starring: Gillian Anderson, Hannah Einbinder, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler, Jess McLeod, Zach Cherry, Dylan Baker, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Quintessa Swindell
MUBI, Rated R, Running time 112 minutes, Premiered May 13, 2026 at the Cannes Film Festival

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