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. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival, this dense and often funny narrative questions our relationship to fantasies. A true pleasure of cinema.
In 2024, shortly after the release of her second feature I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun whetted our appetites by describing her next project as a Portrait of the Young Girl on Fire set within the horror saga Friday the 13th. Two years later, as that film opens the Un Certain Regard section at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, it is clear that it was no lie: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is indeed a delirious love letter to 1980s slashers under the guise of a consuming passion between two female characters.
Kris, played by Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), is a young queer filmmaker chosen to relaunch the Camp Miasma horror franchise, a cult series from the eighties tainted by increasingly cheesy sequels. To conceive this reboot, she decides to enlist Billy Presley (portrayed by Gillian Anderson), the star of the original installment who has withdrawn from the Hollywood industry and lives in seclusion at the old vacation camp nestled in the snowy wilderness where the first film was shot. There, things do not go as planned and Kris falls under the spell of the fallen starlet…
If one was already seduced by the polished aesthetics of her previous films, Jane Schoenbrun raises the bar with this new feature. Between gory, over-the-top slaughter scenes and wide, painterly daylight exterior shots, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a visual delight from start to finish. But beyond its evident formal qualities, it is also a generous and hard-to-pin-down work, with multiple levels of interpretation.
A meta and sensuous homage
Between romance, horror cinema, and comedy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma chooses not to choose, standing as a multi-faceted oddity: a tortured sapphic love story as we like them—featuring an exquisite Gillian Anderson—, an exploration of sexuality and the creation of our fantasies, a critique of the nostalgia business that gnaws at a film industry obsessed with profit… Hard to decide, and that’s a good thing!
We also want to see a big wink at the concept of elevated horror, a label affixed since the 2010s to horror features — Midsommar, Get Out, The Witch… — perceived as more artistic, elevating the horror genre as a cultural object more worthy of prestige. Through well-timed quips, meta humor, and nods calibrated for genre fans, Jane Schoenbrun mocks this condescending trend, preferring to portray horror, and more specifically the slasher, as a regression-prone pleasure and a fertile ground for the first thrills and sexual arousal. At once funny and sensuous, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an excellent moment of cinema and one of the queer highlights of the Festival.
