Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Snapshot

Jane Schoenbrun's third narrative feature takes the most rule-bound form in American horror, the summer-camp slasher, and turns it into a film about the people who make and worship such films. Kris, an aspiring queer filmmaker, is hired to reboot a cult slasher franchise called "Camp Miasma." Kris goes looking for Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the original film's final girl, who now lives on the abandoned Camp Miasma set. So it is a horror film about horror-film authorship and horror-film fandom. Its director's first two features were already about how screen fictions colonize the people who love them too much.

The film premiered at Cannes in May 2026 in Un Certain Regard, where it won the Queer Palm. It opened in American theaters in August and began streaming on Mubi on October 2, 2026. Schoenbrun wrote and directed. Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven and Patrick Fischler head the cast, and Plan B's Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner produced. It runs 112 minutes and was shot on 35mm. Reviews have been strongly positive: 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 89. Critics have mostly framed the film as a turn toward play and pleasure after the anguish of I Saw the TV Glow (2024). The main reservation is that its maximalism sometimes crowds the frame and its in-jokes sometimes puncture the spell.

Industry & production

The film's premise is a report on the industry that produced it. American horror in the 2020s has been organized around the resurrection of dormant intellectual property. Halloween (2018), Scream (2022), which named the "requel" in its own dialogue, Candyman (2021), The Exorcist: Believer (2023), Texas Chain Saw, Hellraiser and The Toxic Avenger all propose that a franchise's death is a temporary condition. The Friday the 13th series, the ur-text of the camp slasher, supplies the sharpest real-world rhyme. A copyright-termination dispute between screenwriter Victor Miller and the producing interests behind Sean S. Cunningham's original kept the property effectively frozen for the better part of a decade. A prequel series, Crystal Lake, was later set up at Peacock. A film about a young director handed a dormant slasher property is not satire written from imagination.

Schoenbrun's own rise is the other half of the industrial story. A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018) was an essay-documentary assembled entirely from YouTube videos about the Slender Man. We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) was a microbudget feature shot with a skeleton crew and released by Utopia. I Saw the TV Glow premiered at Sundance and was released by A24. Camp Miasma is the next step up. It was produced by Plan B, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner's company, on a reported $10 million budget, and its box office stands at $8.7 million. Principal photography ran from May to June 2025 in British Columbia, at Camp Barnard near Sooke. A working summer camp stood in for the fictional franchise's ruined set.

The release path reflects the specialty market of the mid-2020s: a Cannes sidebar premiere and a festival prize, then a summer theatrical run, then a fast move to Mubi's streaming service. Critics have read the film's own story as staging the conflict that path implies. Rory O'Connor of The Film Stage singled out its theme of artistic vision against studio commercialism. Tara Brady of the Irish Times read it in part as a Hollywood satire and a queer deconstruction of franchise culture.

Technology

The film's main technological decision is analog. Camp Miasma was shot on 35mm film, and reviewers have tied that choice to its texture. One review credited the stock, together with hand-painted matte backdrops, with giving the film's heightened reality warmth and grain. Painted backdrops are a pre-digital technique, used here openly rather than hidden. They place the film's world somewhere between a location and a soundstage, which suits a story set on an abandoned film set.

The second register is format archaeology. A legacy sequel is obsessed with its own archive: it has to reproduce, quote or fake footage from an earlier film. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue recreated the burnt-sienna cast of aged celluloid for the film-within-the-film. Brady describes a texture of degraded videotapes, lurid color, cheap-looking effects and tacky music. These are the forms through which most fans actually met the slashers of the 1980s, and the film treats them as sacred text rather than kitsch. That fluency has a history. World's Fair was built from webcam capture, screen recording and streaming compression. I Saw the TV Glow rebuilt the look of a mid-1990s cable fantasy series as an object of desire.

The third is the economics of gore. The slasher's signature technology is the practical effect, and the film keeps faith with it. The opening blood geyser was reportedly made largely in camera.

Technique

Cinematography

Eric Yue, who shot I Saw the TV Glow, returned. He has said he wanted this film to be much looser and dirtier than that one. TV Glow bathed suburban parking lots and school hallways in saturated, unmotivated color. Camp Miasma draws instead on the night grammar of the older slashers: blue-lit darkness and moonlight cut by fog drifting through trees. Yue has also described matching one snowfall to an unlikely reference, the snow of a Donkey Kong game, which he compared to cream cheese on a bagel. He named his touchstones as a nine-hour Friday the 13th documentary, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sunset Boulevard and Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

The opening sets the camera's terms. An unsteady handheld camera blurs the line between filmmaker and subject. Blake Simons in Sight and Sound noted how close-ups and reflected images build a parallel between voyeurism and spectatorship, so that looking at a body and watching a film become the same act. O'Connor admired the film's close-ups of its actresses' faces, held with an intensity he found beautiful. Schoenbrun has cited the breathing point-of-view shot from Michael Myers's eyes in Halloween as formative. That is the slasher's founding image of the camera as predator. The film quotes this grammar and then turns it back on the viewer.

Editing

Graham Mason cut the film; Schoenbrun's previous editor was Sofi Marshall. The editing showpiece reviewers mention most is the opening credits sequence. O'Connor called it a tour de force: a compressed history of a horror franchise from origin to exhaustion, the life cycle of a property told in montage before the story begins. Schoenbrun's earlier features were patient to the point of provocation, built on held shots, hard cuts to black and unannounced jumps across years. The slasher is a rhythm machine of cross-cut set pieces, false scares and stingers. A film about making one stages an argument between those two clocks along the seam of its film-within-a-film structure.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The summer camp is one of American horror's most fully coded spaces: bunk cabins, dock, dining hall, woods, lake. Its layout is so standardized that audiences navigate it in advance. Here that space is literally a ruin of a production. Billy Presley lives on the abandoned set of the original Camp Miasma, a real place that is also a facsimile of itself. The 35mm photography and hand-painted mattes make the setting feel both tactile and openly artificial.

Brady calls the film maximalist, sometimes to the point of clutter. It is dense with trash-cinema iconography, and the decor of a fan's devotion is arranged like relics. That density is part of the method. It is also, for some critics, its cost. O'Connor found that some of the winking references break the spell more than they deepen it.

Sound

Alex G, who scored both of Schoenbrun's previous features, returned as composer. His work on those films used detuned guitar, room tone, and songs staged as full performance interludes rather than underscore. I Saw the TV Glow used its soundtrack as a structural element, closer to 1990s teen-film and New Queer Cinema needle-drop practice than to horror scoring. In Camp Miasma, the music for the fictional franchise belongs to the trash aesthetic Brady describes, deliberately tacky and part of the film's devotion to cheapness. Slasher sound is its own tradition of instruction. Harry Manfredini's ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma is the genre's most famous piece of pure signal, a cue that tells the audience what to feel before showing them anything. A film this steeped in the franchise slasher is working inside that inheritance.

Performance

Schoenbrun has directed toward flatness: performances that withhold catharsis, deliver feeling sideways, and let dissociation register as blankness rather than distress. Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine's work in I Saw the TV Glow is the model. Gillian Anderson's Billy Presley comes from another tradition. Simons describes a Southern accent and glamorous styling, a performance pitched at the scale of a cult star who has outlived her franchise. The film's core is the encounter between that persona and the young filmmaker who seeks her out. Hannah Einbinder, Jack Haven and Patrick Fischler complete the principal cast.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's spine is a two-hander between a young fan-turned-author and the star of the thing the fan loves. That is one of cinema's durable forms. It runs through Sunset Boulevard (1950), which Yue cites directly, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Its closest relative is Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996), in which a director's attempt to remake a silent classic collapses under the weight of the original and of his fixation on its star. Kris's search for Billy Presley turns the reboot from an industrial assignment into a pilgrimage.

Around that spine runs the slasher's ritual machinery, less plot than liturgy: the transgression, the isolation, the sequence of deaths, the survivor. The film-within-a-film structure lets Schoenbrun stage that liturgy and comment on it at once. One review compared a murder spree in the film to In a Violent Nature (2024). The comedy comes from friction between these registers. Desire runs throughout. Simons reads the film as playful and open-hearted about sex, with characters quoting movies as a form of roleplay and sexual fantasy treated as a way of breaking formal boundaries. Schoenbrun has aligned the film with David Lynch's view that a film is its own explanation, and the narrative is built to be felt rather than decoded.

Genre & cycle

Three cycles converge. The camp slasher proper runs from Friday the 13th (1980) through The Burning (1981), Madman (1981), Sleepaway Camp (1983) and Cheerleader Camp (1988). As Richard Nowell's Blood Money documents, the subgenre industrialized itself with remarkable speed, aiming at a youth audience with a formula whose economics were as rigid as its iconography. Schoenbrun's cited references include the Friday the 13th sequels, the long tail of a franchise more than its origin.

The meta-slasher begins in earnest with Scream (1996), whose characters recite the rules. It continues through Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), The Final Girls (2015) and Ti West's X/Pearl/MaXXXine trilogy (2022–24). West's trilogy is the nearest recent kin: horror about film production, aging stardom, and the murderous envy of the person who never got to be on screen. In a Violent Nature attacked the same material from the opposite direction, handing the film to the killer's tempo.

The third is queer and trans horror, and here the camp slasher carries specific freight. Sleepaway Camp's notorious final revelation has been read for four decades as a transmisogynist punchline, and it sits in the subgenre's foundations like a nail. A trans filmmaker making a camp slasher with a queer protagonist enters that history inevitably. The surrounding scholarship includes Harry Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet, the reclamation of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, and Carol Clover's account of the final girl as a figure of cross-identification. Schoenbrun has said they read Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws in college. The film's central figure is, pointedly, a final girl grown old.

Authorship & method

Schoenbrun's practice was formed outside narrative filmmaking: curatorial and programming work, the anthology series The Eyeslicer, and producing Collective:Unconscious (2016), in which five directors adapted one another's dreams. That background shows in an approach that treats found and secondhand material as primary sources rather than references: creepypasta, YouTube confessionals, half-remembered children's television, and now the VHS slasher.

The core collaborators are back. Eric Yue photographed the film and Alex G scored it, both carried over from I Saw the TV Glow. Graham Mason is new as editor. Schoenbrun again wrote the script alone. Their stated influences are telling in their range. David Cronenberg's Crash is one Schoenbrun calls formative. Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) is a model of lush, artificial, in-camera excess. Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about the gaze between artist and subject. Schoenbrun also invokes the Lynch school, where the film itself is the explanation. Placed alongside the Friday the 13th sequels, these references show the method: high and low sources held at equal value, the trash film treated as worthy of the same devotion as the art film.

O'Connor observed that Camp Miasma feels made in a period of joy and play, unlike the crisis that drove I Saw the TV Glow. If the earlier features were about dissociation, this one, by critical consensus, is about appetite.

Movement / national cinema

The film belongs to American independent cinema, in the branch that runs from New Queer Cinema through the internet-native work of the 2010s. Schoenbrun is part of a cohort of trans filmmakers, among them Vera Drew (The People's Joker, 2022), Jules Rosskam and Isabel Sandoval, who arrived with formally adventurous features in a short span, mostly through festivals rather than studio development. The Queer Palm at Cannes places Camp Miasma squarely in that international festival circuit. The other lineage is post-internet: cinema that takes the screen, the forum and the parasocial relationship as its native material, where the horror is that a fiction might be more real than the body watching it.

Era / period

The film is a product of the mid-2020s American film economy. Streaming has contracted, theatrical release has consolidated around horror and event pictures, the post-strike labor settlement is still being tested, and IP exhaustion is advanced enough to be a subject rather than a background condition. Its path from Cannes to theaters to Mubi within five months maps how a mid-budget art film now moves through that economy. The film also arrives during a period of intense and hostile political attention to trans life in the United States, which shapes how a trans-authored genre film is received regardless of its content.

Themes

Fandom as possession. The franchise as a haunted house that eats its tenants. The slasher's inherited moral arithmetic, in which sex is the offense and death the sentence; the title states the equation outright. Brady identifies the film's central inquiry as how horror teaches its viewers about sex, danger and gender. She also notes its fascination with orgasm as the point where pleasure and annihilation meet, the old idea of the little death. Simons focuses on the relationship between the spectator and the spectated, the voyeur's look and the moviegoer's look made into one. O'Connor emphasizes media obsession as a route to queer awakening.

Robin Wood's reading of horror as the return of the repressed and Vera Dika's formalist account of the stalker film in Games of Terror both bear on a film that treats generic rules as symptoms. Beneath all of these sits the theme Schoenbrun has pursued from the start: the terror and relief of recognizing yourself in something that was never meant to be about you. Here it is played less as dread than as desire.

Reception, canon & influence

Camp Miasma premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May 2026 and won the Queer Palm. Aggregate notices are among the strongest of Schoenbrun's career: 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 89. Simons in Sight and Sound praised it as an open-hearted slasher, playful about both sex and cinema. O'Connor at The Film Stage, reviewing from Cannes, called it a joyful addition to Schoenbrun's body of work and singled out the opening credits and the close-ups of its actresses. He also found that some of its knowing references break the spell. Brady in the Irish Times was the most divided. She found its maximalism both fascinating and frustrating, absorbing in its devotion to trash cinema and at times overstuffed. Against a reported $10 million budget, the film has grossed $8.7 million.

Backward. The lines of influence are unusually legible. Friday the 13th and its sequels, and Sleepaway Camp, supply the setting and its politics. Halloween's point-of-view shot supplies the predatory camera. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street supply the slasher's broader canon. Scream stands for self-aware genre. Sunset Boulevard and Irma Vep give the fan-and-star structure. Peeping Tom (1960) and Berberian Sound Studio (2012) treat filmmaking as complicity in violence. Cronenberg's Crash, cited by Schoenbrun, and Videodrome stand for the media-body. Lynch's Mulholland Drive covers the doubled performer and the film that is its own explanation. Bram Stoker's Dracula shows artifice as sensual excess. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about the gaze between artist and subject. Gregg Araki and Todd Haynes set the register in which queer desire, pop music and teenage apocalypse coexist.

Forward. The film consolidates a position visible across the 2020s: the art-horror feature that takes a disreputable subgenre seriously enough to inhabit it rather than ironize it. It does so with a subgenre whose foundational texts include an injury to the filmmaker's own community. That is rarer than a meta-slasher. A Cannes prize, near-unanimous critical support and a 35mm, practical-effects aesthetic make it a likely reference point for the next wave of queer genre cinema and for any film that tries to reclaim the franchise slasher from the inside.