Name: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Released: 2026-08-07T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 112 min
Cast: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler, Arthur Conti

A dead franchise is a strange thing to inherit. Camp Miasma has been sequelized into exhaustion, its scares photocopied until none of them land, its fandom thinned to a rump of completists who show up out of habit. Then it gets handed to someone who actually wants it — not to milk it, but because she loves the cheap, disreputable thing it used to be. That transfer, the moment a piece of disposable horror becomes one person’s fixation, is where Jane Schoenbrun starts.

The film Schoenbrun builds around that handover is a slasher about the making of a slasher, and it flatly refuses to treat those as two separate jobs. A young director takes the reboot and goes looking for the actress who played the original’s final girl, a recluse who has spent years arranging not to be looked at. What begins as a casting courtship curdles into something nearer to possession. The horror on offer is authorship itself — who owns a monster, who gets to hold the knife, who survives being watched.

Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, the incoming director, and the casting is the argument. Einbinder’s comic register runs on nerve and self-exposure, and Schoenbrun weaponizes both. Kris is a fan who knows exactly how cheap her object of love is and reaches for it anyway, which makes her the rare horror protagonist whose worst danger is her own taste. She is the audience surrogate and the aggressor at once, and the film never lets her off either hook.

Opposite her, Gillian Anderson is Billy Presley, the vanished final girl. Anderson plays her as composure with a fault line running through it, a woman who long ago understood that in this franchise being an icon and being prey were the same role shot from different angles. When Kris comes courting, Billy has to decide whether a comeback is a resurrection or just a second killing. The two women circling one another, each trying to work out who is directing whom, is the film’s real event; the body count is almost a courtesy to the genre.

Schoenbrun has spent their features on the way screens colonize the people who stare into them — the queasy online fandom of the first one, the dysphoric television haze of the film that broke them to a wider audience. This is the first time they have taken a functioning commercial horror engine and run it at full genre speed instead of dismantling it from the outside. The preoccupation has not changed: identity assembled and taken apart by the images we consume. Camp Miasma simply hands it a knife.

It works, too, as a joke at the industry’s expense, told without a punchline’s mercy. Camp Miasma stands in for every intellectual property dragged back onto the operating table long after its pulse stopped, and Kris is every director handed a corpse and told to make it walk. Schoenbrun’s sympathy sits with the fan who takes that assignment seriously, but the film is clear-eyed about the cost: to reboot something is to dig it up, and digging things up is how horror movies begin.

What keeps the conceit from collapsing into a seminar is that Schoenbrun never lets the meta-frame become an alibi. The kills are real kills. The camp, the lake, the mud, the blade rising out of black water — the slasher furniture gets shot straight, with none of the winking that usually apologizes for it, and only then does the desire between the two women warp the frame. The film opened Un Certain Regard at Cannes and left with the Queer Palm, the surest sign that the romance is not a garnish laid over the gore. It is the load-bearing wall.

The gamble is legibility. A story this folded in on itself, a reboot about a reboot and a final girl about final girls, risks paying off only for viewers who already speak fluent slasher and can hear every echo. Schoenbrun’s command of tone has never been the question; their command of an audience that has not done the homework is the open one. Whether the metatext arrives as genuine dread or merely as cleverness is the thing the running time has to settle, and the trailer, canny as it is, keeps that answer just offscreen.

A still from Jane Schoenbrun slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma from 2026 — A scene from *Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma* (2026)

The ensemble around the two leads is deep. Jack Haven appears as Little Death and Patrick Fischler as Rudolph, with Arthur Conti, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Dylan Baker, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Quintessa Swindell and Kevin McDonald filling out the camp. Plan B Entertainment produced alongside Mubi, which is also steering the release across much of the world.

Mubi opens Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in New York and Los Angeles on August 7, with a limited expansion the week after and a wider American run to follow. The film runs 112 minutes. International dates through Mubi and The Match Factory arrive across late summer and into the autumn, territory by territory.