“TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA” - REVIEW
The dog days of summer are upon us, but at least for this humble Movie Friend, and especially when compared to most Augusts, you wouldn’t know that if you only had your average movie marquee to go by.
In a dead heat for the best seven-words-long movie title with another favorite 2026 release (NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE), TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s dazzling, romantic follow-up to I SAW THE TV GLOW, and is all about extremes.
It’s trashy and elevated (aka woke). It’s wild and mellow. It’s lusty and wholesome. It’s grotesque and graceful. It’s loud and so so soft. It’s introspective and in-your-face. It’s a bloody, gushy queer love story, and it’s an examination of a generation that continues to learn about their intimate selves through a diet of perhaps watching too many movies (I’m thinking of a lyric in the opening musical number of SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT which goes “off to the movies we shall go/where we learn everything that we know/‘cause the movies teach us what our parents don’t have time to say”). It’s an acknowledgment of a junk food that has the appearance of nourishment, and about a deep loneliness that that nourishment cannot possibly hope to sustain.
It’s also about two of the artist’s oldest obsessions, right there in the title (itself a cheeky summation of film’s most profitable genre), and the distance between them, which can either be a chasm, or as close as a lover’s breath. On that note, it’s about a reclamation of women’s places in horror films (both in front of and behind the camera), as well as a reclamation of horror films centering female pleasure. It is all these things at once.
This may not sound like your idea of a good time, but don’t worry… well, OK, it’s certainly not everybody’s idea of a good time. However, it also is extremely bloody, wickedly funny, lovingly and painstakingly crafted (40 years of Camp Miasma franchise history had to be created by the art department), and boasts incredible performances from an exciting star on the rise (HACKS’ Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a queer filmmaker who’s been given the chance to revive the dormant Camp Miasma franchise) and from a treasured TV icon (the incomparable Gillian Anderson in a daffy Tennessee Williams southern accent as Billy, the final girl from the first film who now lives on the abandoned camp property where the franchise was filmed).
There is perhaps only so much I can write about this film as a man, so I will conclude with a quote from the director herself: "I'm working in these mediums that are clearly indebted to commercial power structures. And the more I do it, the more I'm like, that's the core tension. I love television. I love American movies. And I also want to destroy them. I see them as prisons as much as they are spaces of emancipation."
With its unimpeachable craft, inspired supporting cast (MULHOLLAND DR.’s Patrick Fischler, SNL’s Sarah Sherman, and SEVERANCE’s Zach Cherry, as well as Quintessa Swindell, Eva Victor, Dylan Baker and KIDS IN THE HALL’s Kevin McDonald), and endlessly tender and thoughtful provocations, TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA does for sleepaway camp slasher flicks what I SAW THE TV GLOW did for YA bubblegum horror TV shows. It continues Schoenbrun’s thread of “if popular entertainment got me into this sexually complex mess, perhaps it can get me out of it.” But will they escape with their lives? And in the movie’s hyper-articulate yet deliciously Lynchian way, do they even want to?
TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is now playing in theaters.
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Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Association (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: www.mnfca.com