Review: In a world of dead-end trauma narratives, CAMP MIASMA offers a way forward

Wunderkind director Jane Schoenbrun's new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, reframes queer trauma tropes in horror, centering embodiment, desire, and the work of healing.

Words inspired by conversations with Horror Master Gregory Paul Silber and Horror Mistress Avery Kaplan.

Queer horror fans have a complicated relationship with the genre. On one hand, it's easy to see ourselves in the "othered" monsters who populate these stories — freaks and outcasts searching for acceptance as they are. On the other hand, the genre's long history of coding queerness as monstrous has done real damage, cementing the idea that we don't get to exist authentically without being punished for it.

So here comes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a title so defiantly horny it dares you to look away, and a film that refuses the genre's oldest bargain. Its "othered" queer characters don't die to satisfy the audience's appetite for punishment. Instead, the film ends somewhere far rarer in the horror genre: in queer and trans joy, a framework which insists that delight, silliness, sensuality, and celebration are equally central to the experience, and arguably more radical to depict, because they refuse to let queer life be defined solely by what's been done to it.

I'll say it plainly: this is one of my favorite movies of the year, if not my favorite movie of the year. 

A slasher that eats its own tail

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun — the non-binary filmmaker behind 2021's We're All Going to the World's Fair and 2024's breakout I Saw the TV Glow — Camp Miasma is structured as a movie within a movie. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young queer director hired to reboot a long-dormant slasher franchise called Camp Miasma, whose in-universe villain, Little Death (Jack Haven), is the vengeful ghost of a gender-nonconforming camper bullied to death decades earlier. Chasing the reboot, Kris tracks down Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive actress who played the original film's final girl, and the two are pulled into something far stranger and more intimate than a casting meeting.

Camp Miasma wasn't about sex in the way I thought it was going to be about sex based on the pre-film coverage. It was really about sexual trauma, but specifically the sexual trauma of having been born into the wrong gender — the whole "I used to have to dissociate to get off" of it all— then discovering joy in the authentic embodiment of yourself. The title's wordplay is the whole thesis in miniature. Little Death is also, of course, the old euphemism for orgasm — la petite mort, a phrase with roots that predate its sexual meaning entirely. English borrowed it as early as 1572, when it simply meant a fainting spell, and the term didn't attach itself to orgasm in print until 1882. Famously used in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the phrase is also sometimes used to describe when an undesired thing has happened to a person, which has affected them so much that a part of them dies inside.

Schoenbrun's film collapses that whole etymological history into a single joke and a single villain: the thing that's supposed to kill you and the thing that makes you feel most alive are, it turns out, the same thing wearing different faces. Every design choice around Little Death leans into that: the spear, the industrial HVAC-vent helmet, the whole vibe reads like a figure built entirely out of a culture's need to punish itself for wanting things.

"Shut up": shame as the villain

What sets Camp Miasma apart from the genre's default setting isn't the comedy, though; it's what Schoenbrun does with it. Talking to the San Francisco Chronicle ahead of the film's Frameline premiere, Schoenbrun described writing the film years into their own transition, driven by the experience of finally inhabiting their body and identity "in a way that felt right." Getting to the heart of that feeling, they said, meant confronting the self-image they'd long carried of their own transness as something to be ashamed of. Positioning shame as the antagonist reframes recovery and pleasure as intentional acts, not just outcomes.

Schoenbrun put it even more directly at Cannes, telling Fred Film Radio's Chiara Nicoletti: "If I was going to make a personal movie about feeling good in my body, shame was the villain." 

That shame, they explained, wasn't abstract, it's in your face and ever present, thanks to those pesky societal messages received by young kids who are figuring out their own queer identities. For young trans horror fans like myself (and Jane), that shame can partially be traced back to growing up in the '90s with a horror canon whose primary vocabulary for transness was monstrosity: Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, Sleepaway Camp, all films Camp Miasma directly references, and making the film meant taking that same iconography and running it in reverse. 

"My movie is a remake because I am trying to quite literally remake myself," Schoenbrun said, "and remake that iconography into something that doesn't make me feel like shit as a kid."

That's a markedly different starting point than I Saw The TV Glow, a movie about the crisis of becoming, still trapped in dissociation, which functions almost as this film's dark mirror. Camp Miasma is the sequel to that horror, not a retreat from it. Thinking of the two as in conversation with each other, it's hard not to read Kris and Billy's whole dynamic as Schoenbrun staging a conversation between where they used to be and where they've landed. One woman (Kris) is still performing for an industry that wants her legible and "elevated" — a bit the movie needles constantly, right down to a studio note literally used as a punchline: "elevated, a.k.a. woke" — the other (Billy) having already burned all of that down to live entirely on her own terms.

Is any of this "real"? And does it matter?

Camp Miasma is constantly asking the viewer to clock the seams between "real" and "movie-within-the-movie" — Kris and Billy's story, the in-universe original Camp Miasma slasher they're remaking, and the uncanny killing-spree climax that closes it all out — and it never quite resolves which layer you're standing in. Little Death's rampage during the finale plays almost as pure fantasy, scored to a Counting Crows needle-drop that's doing way too much emotional heavy lifting for a slasher kill scene (or maybe the perfect amount, I can't decide), with at least one death shot for laughs rather than dread. But are the comedic deaths meant to signal an unrealness, or are they not, as the film ends with depictions of the murdered bodies covered in flies… so they're at least real enough to rot, right?

I don't think that's a flaw so much as the point. A movie that is this committed to blurring the line between the trauma you survive and the trauma you get to narrativize and control isn't going to hand you a clean answer about which parts "actually happened" to Kris. If you're the kind of viewer who reads that ambiguity as the film having its cake and eating it too, I get it, even if I don't agree. I'd argue the ambiguity is doing real work: it's the difference between a flashback and a story you've finally gotten to tell on your own terms.

Schoenbrun has said they were reading a lot of eroticism philosopher Georges Bataille while conceiving the film's gaze on sex, and it shows. Camp Miasma keeps treating desire as something closer to a "mating ritual" than a romance, an idea the film states almost literally when young Billy watches teenagers on a strength-testing machine at the camp fair and narrates it in exactly those terms. It's a funny line, but it's also Schoenbrun's whole approach to the genre in miniature: horror and courtship rituals aren't opposites; they're the same animal behavior wearing different costumes, and slasher movies have always known that even when they were too squeamish to say it.

The filmmaker has also talked about the format itself as a container for something that would otherwise be too much, a way to stage all the ugliness of "a world that is sick, misogynist, and filled with violence" without it actually being war. It's pretend (well, probably), and that's precisely the point: if it gets too real, you can turn it off. That framing goes a long way toward explaining why the film can be simultaneously this tender and this violent without the tonal whiplash ever feeling like a mistake. The gore is doing the same job the joke is doing, giving you somewhere safe to put something that would otherwise have nowhere to go.

Camp Miasma both kind of pokes fun at and kind of pays homage to "problematic cinema"

None of this comes from nowhere. Schoenbrun was writing X-Files fan fiction at eight or nine, and by middle school they'd graduated to directing their friends in full slasher plots on a cheap camcorder. It tracks. Much like how I Saw the TV Glow was a love letter to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom, Camp Miasma is soaked in the specific, almost sacred ritual of horror fandom as a kid: renting every Nightmare on Elm Street tape in a single summer, the illicit thrill of the horror aisle at the video store, candy, and hollering at the most outrageous kill in the room. Schoenbrun has described that feeling as fundamentally joyful, and it runs through this movie's DNA, with even its goriest beats having the texture of a sleepover dare rather than a punishment.

Schoenbrun clearly adores the slasher movies this film is in conversation with, and the homages are dense enough to reward a rewatch: there's The Shining-coded drive up the mountain to an isolated camp, a vocally transphobic punk-rock final girl who plays like a direct riff on Return of the Living Dead's naked cemetery dancer, and a black-and-white-suited harbinger-of-doom character who reads as a wink at David Lynch's stable of tell-you-you're-doomed types. Then, there's the hotel clerk who plays the returning cop in each of the Camp Miasma slasher movies, played by Kevin McDonald, who is known for Kids in the Hall, an intrinsically queer show with its cross-dressing, for voicing Pleakley in Lilo and Stitch, who's the one-eyed alien who cross-dresses and has become a fan-favorite character in the trans community.

But the affection comes paired with a clear-eyed indictment of the genre's own habits: how "final girls" get discarded by the industry the second the cameras stop rolling, how legacy franchises get handed to a "diverse" director for a facelift without any actual power, how a queer assistant character exists in a script meeting only to make the room look progressive while never once getting to speak for themself. It's a needle Schoenbrun threads well — this is a movie that clearly loves the slasher and is furious at what the slasher has historically done to people like its own characters (e.g., the phenomenon of slashers going so out of their way to other queer, trans people that any other alternative lifestyle is fine, but God help you if you're trans.)

Why it's a way forward

Camp Miasma marks the start of Schoenburn's post-transition artistic phase, a clear shift from earlier work. While on their press tour for the film, the filmmaker openly discussed how the film explores post-transition sex, as well as the joy of the first time having sex as your authentic self. And in the current era of horror narratives which don't have much more to say about trauma other than "trauma is the beast within that you carry and pass down," it was truly refreshing to watch a film that highlights the beauty that emerges after someone actively works through personal trauma, instead of letting themselves be defined by it.

Schoenbrun has called the film their best attempt at a "sleepover classic," and there's something fitting in that framing: it's a movie that wants to be both a comfort object and a provocation, made by a filmmaker whose relationship to the genre has always been sincere even at its most gleefully unhinged. Where this leaves Schoenbrun next is anyone's guess — the trajectory from cult hit (World's Fair) to bigger cult hit (TV Glow) to whatever Camp Miasma turns into is exactly the point in a career where things could tip toward the interesting-auteur path or the chase-the-check path. I'm choosing to be optimistic. Everything about this movie suggests someone who knows exactly what they're doing and why, and I cannot wait to see them keep exploring narratives that center queer and trans joy.

It's a needle horror rarely threads: taking queerness, transness, and sexual trauma seriously without asking the audience to sit only in the wound. Camp Miasma knows the wound is there. It just isn't interested in ending the story there. Instead, all the queers get what they want in the end — long live the revolution!

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by Jane Schoenbrun and starring Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, and Jack Haven, is now playing in theaters via Mubi.