18/08/2026 - With their third feature, Jane Schoenbrun offers a brilliant and uproarious tribute to the slasher, reinvented through a queer lens

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

After two fiction features, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow (both selected for Sundance), which turned them into the “enfant terrible” of US independent cinema, Jane Schoenbrun presented their electrifying, cerebral yet pop-infused work Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at Cannes, in the Un Certain Regard section, where it won the Queer Palm, and more recently at the NIFFF (Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival). Already released in several European countries and due out tomorrow, distributed by MUBI, in Belgium (together with Cinéart) and Italy, on Thursday in Germany and the Netherlands (also together with Cinéart), and on Friday in the UK, the film intelligently revisits the slasher genre with a healthy dose of humour, delivering a queer reinterpretation that is sure to go down in history.

Having drawn on "creepypasta" aesthetics for their first fiction feature, before subsequently delving into the paranormal and psychological horror in their second, Schoenbrun once again embraces genre cinema with their latest effort. An exhilarating, pleasurable but also necessary queer reworking of the slasher genre, their new fiction flick urges us to reflect on the concept of pleasure from a perspective that is no longer heterocentric, normalising and reassuring, but deliberately skewed, different and liberating.

Kris (played magnificently by Hannah Einbinder), a brilliant queer filmmaker and intellectual, is hired by a production company to direct a new instalment in a long-running slasher franchise known as Camp Miasma. It is a “woke” reboot, as the producers describe it, of a transphobic 1980s slasher series. Kris wants to persuade the now-retired actress (a sublime Gillian Anderson) who played the “final girl” in the original film to take the lead role in her new movie. After a long and complicated journey, the protagonist tracks down her idol in the mountains, in an abandoned place she has chosen as a refuge following the trauma she endured during the original shoot. What initially strikes Kris is that the final girl’s chosen hideaway is the very same location that served as the setting for the original film. As the two women begin working together, a profound bond with delightfully psychosexual overtones starts to develop, pushing them to embark on a cathartic journey together, leading from the pain of trauma towards liberation and a much-longed-for sexual awakening – in an exquisitely queer vein. Like a never-ending pyjama party fuelled by sweets and gummy bears, their time together becomes a suspended, liberating and non-judgemental space in which to explore a sexuality freed from any normative constraint.

Within the cinematic mythology of the Camp Miasma franchise, the villain, the bloodthirsty killer who emerges from the depths of the lake, is not a masked figure with a dark past, but rather a ghost whose face is concealed behind an air duct, known as Little Death – a slang expression meaning “orgasm”. Armed with a spear, Little Death is the vengeful reincarnation of a former summer-camp attendee who was subjected to a vicious transphobic campaign that ultimately led to his death. Condemned to live for eternity in the depths of Camp Tivoli’s lake, “the monster” resurfaces seasonally to murder teenagers gripped by uncontrollable hormonal upheaval.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both an ode to and a hilarious, achingly tender celebration of queerness, of the joy of experiencing one’s sexuality in a body finally freed from binary constraints and from the heteropatriarchal impositions of a cruel and unforgiving society. By the end of this fantastical and delightfully blood-soaked adventure, the protagonist is finally able to inhabit her own body with the awareness of someone who no longer cares about the rules, experiencing pleasure rooted in joy and light-heartedness, rather than in the pain of past trauma. In this sense, the film is an autobiographical reflection on what happens after gender dysphoria has been overcome, when one can finally be oneself in an authentic body because it at last corresponds to one’s gender identity.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was produced by MUBI together with US outfit Plan B Entertainment and Canada’s Scythia Films. The Match Factory handles its international sales.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 13/05/2026: Cannes 2026 - Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

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Jane Schoenbrun
© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it