Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma

You might come for the carnal shenanigans and general blood-letting suggested by the title of Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, but you’d better be prepared to stick around for the psychosexual drama that’s lying underneath. I Saw The TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun is on an ambitious mission to offer an homage-cum-critique of the Eighties slasher genre while taking a sideswipe at Hollywood’s approach to franchises and intellectual property. Most interestingly, it explores how it can be hard to know what’s “normal” in terms of relationships for a teenager depending on what their formative viewing of sex might have been, although this element is rather pushed out by the schlock.

That this heady mix opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes Film Festival is an impressive endorsement, in a way, but this is a film that is surely going to be much more at home on the horror circuit in the coming year.

Camp Miasma is a horror franchise of the typical Eighties ilk, featuring a group of teens – played by older actors, of course – who go off to a remote camp and get picked off one by one by Little Death (a nod to the sex=death scenario that plays out in many slasher favourites). We learn all this in a delightfully detailed credits sequence, complete with toys, collectible cards and a whole lot more, that fully sets the scene for a film series that has run its course and then some.

As so many horror franchises have taught us, however, there’s always a tendency among studio executives to want to go back to the well, however dirty the water. So it is that horror fan and indie breakout director Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has managed to get the gig to resurrect Little Death, although she’s under strick instructions to make it “elevated. AKA woke”. Her plan is to convince the now-reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson with a full throttle southern belle accent) – the original movie’s final girl – to take part in her reboot. Heading out into the snowy north of the US, she discovers that Billy has, in fact, moved into the camp where the movie was shot.

Schoenbrun proceeds to weave the original Camp Miasma film into the story of Kris’ attempts to woo Billy that increasingly take on a sexual as well as a filmmaking vibe. There’s a lot of fun to be had initially, whether it’s the truckload of Kensington gore that has been ordered in to produce fountains of blood from victims or the genuinely creepy ambivalence of Billy’s character initially, with hints that she might, indeed, have gone mad in the woods. Desire and dipping sauce have also rarely been as cleverly worked as they are here.

The blood letting has its issues within this context, though, as the law of diminishing returns starts to apply – quite the opposite from what should happen with a good slasher. The idea is that Kris is starting to lose it but scenes in which she and Billy are seen against a manufactured backdrop feel more indulgent than illuminating and while Anderson and Einbinder are a terrific pairing there’s a point where logic leaves the building in terms of the plot. There’s no faulting the craft, however, particularly Eric K Yue’s period camerawork, in both colour and shot choice, on the original Camp Miasma and the exceptional franchise detailing in those opening credits.

Reviewed on: 14 May 2026