After I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun takes ownership of the horror subgenre of the slasher with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Presented at the Cannes Film Festival, this dense and often funny narrative interrogates our relationship to fantasies. A true pleasure of cinema.
In 2024, shortly after the release of her second feature-length film I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun teased us by describing her next project as a Portrait of the Girl on Fire that would unfold… in the horror saga Friday the 13th. Two years later, the film in question opens the Un Certain Regard section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, and it must be said that this was no idle claim: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is indeed a delirious love letter to the 80s slashers, under the guise of a consuming passion between two female characters.
Kris, played by Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), is a young director chosen to relaunch the Camp Miasma horror franchise, the cult eighties series marred by increasingly campy sequels. To design this reboot, she decides to enlist Billy Presley (played by Gillian Anderson), the star of the original installment who has withdrawn from Hollywood and lives in seclusion in the old vacation camp nestled in the snowy woods where the first opus was shot. Things do not go as planned, and Kris falls under the spell of the fallen starlet…
A Meta and Sensual Homage
If you were already drawn to the polished aesthetic of her previous films, Jane Schoenbrun raises the stakes with this new feature. Between over-the-top gore-filled kill scenes and painterly wide exterior daylight shots, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a visual delight from start to finish. Beyond its obvious formal qualities, it is also a generous and hard-to-pin-down work, with several levels of reading.
Between romance, horror, and comedy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma refuses to pick a side, rising as a multi-faceted anomaly: a tormented sapphic love story as we like it—with an exquisite Gillian Anderson—but also an exploration of sexuality and the making of our fantasies, and a critique of the nostalgia business that gnaws at a film industry obsessed with profit… Hard to decide, and that’s a good thing!
There’s also a big wink at the concept of elevated horror, a label since the 2010s for horror features— Midsommar, Get Out, The Witch— perceived as more artistic, elevating the horror genre to a cultural object more worthy of prestige. Thanks to well-timed lines, meta humor and nods calibrated for fans of the genre, Jane Schoenbrun mocks this condescending movement, preferring to depict horror, and more specifically the slasher, as a regressive pleasure and a fertile ground for early thrills and sexual arousal. At once funny and sensual, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an excellent moment of cinema and one of the queer highlights of the Festival.
