Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

Ironically for a film all about celebrating the embodied experience of living life over going through it at an intellectual remove, I ended up appreciating Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma more on an intellectual level than an experiential one. 

Sure, there are some elements of the film that are straightforwardly pleasurable – the sets and visuals are often gorgeous, and who doesn’t enjoy watching Gillian Anderson, as reclusive ex-scream queen Billy, vamp it up to the nth degree as she sexily taps her nails across a dipping sauce packet? But much like its protagonist, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), the film often feels like it can’t get out of its own head. I was so eager to be seduced by Billy but the story never really lets you get there. Just as Kris hides behind her glasses and her artistic work, the film spends so much of its runtime introducing Ideas and Themes and ignoring the pulpy delights of a slasher film – the pure enjoyment of “flesh and fluids,” as Billy puts it. 

I had been expecting the film to operate at least in some respects like the campy horror films it's referencing, and it really never does. For me, a slasher is fun because of the dependable scaffolding of the genre’s plot conventions: the slow, steady build in tension and gore, all building to a climactic, blood-gushing finish, with the killer revealed and defeated (for now…) and the triumphant final girl, blood-soaked and victorious. The film never fully evokes this. Instead, the villain Little Death is more a metaphor, a concept, than a flesh and blood threat – making the slasher elements feel less genuine. So while the film does introduce some compelling meditations on repressed sexuality and general modern anxieties, it’s just not that interesting to engage with in an immediate sense because you’re not getting the candy-popcorn-cherry cola experience of a predictable, gripping B-movie flick. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma does work on a sort of meta level. While watching this sex movie in a packed crowd, I kept thinking about the dual cultural narratives about how sexless modern blockbusters are, combined with worries about people not going to see films in person. Maybe Camp Miasma has the solution: put sex back in the movies again. Film it and they will come.

Seeing the film in theaters, surrounded by every queer film nerd in the north Brooklyn area free on a Monday night, watching something that is often sexy and tender and uncomfortable, is its own sort of pleasurable experience. Feels like a great place to cruise, if you’re in the mood for that sort of thing. 

Each month I highlight an organization that’s important to me. I encourage people to check out the cool work they do, and also to find causes within their community to support as well.

This month I’m selfishly highlighting a Kickstarter for Negative Space, a horror themed bar and theater near me, because I want them to open as quickly as possible.