Director – Jane Schoenbrun – 2026 – US – Cert. 15 – 106m
**
A film director given the job of rebooting the Camp Miasma horror franchise finds her life turned upside-down by the reclusive star of the original film – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 21st
Once upon a time, there was a series of slasher movies about Camp Miasma in which Little Death – a possibly male figure wearing an air vent on their head and wielding a long, pointed, metal spear – would appear from the lake and kill people. Such as, for instance, the hapless, dog-walking elderly couple of whom the man is turned into a ludicrously high fountain of blood. 29-year-old Indie filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has picked up the job of making the latest instalment in the popular horror franchise which she has watched since its inception.
In order to put together a pitch for the series’ producers, she travels to the off the beaten track home of the original film’s final girl Billy (Gillian Anderson). En route, she’s thrilled to pick up a DVD copy of the sixth entry in the franchise from a roadside store where she stops to buy Gummies and other confectionery. At her hotel the desk clerk manages to find her an old DVD player in a storage cupboard so she can watch the disc.
Next day, her SatNav takes her down a snowy track seemingly to the middle of nowhere, where she finds a vast home equipped with a film projector onto which is loaded the opening reel of the first film in the franchise. And where she is surprised by a figure from the shadows – the reclusive Billy herself.
From here, things get increasingly bizarre, with the narrative constructed in a convoluted series of layers upon layers, eventually culminating in final girl Kris’s reuniting with Billy to re-enact the latter’s first sexual experience involving her partner on that occasion being speared by Little Death. This is followed by the pair of them covered in blood as they go shopping.
This film uses violence as a metaphor for sexual fulfilment, but that really didn’t work for me: far too clever for its own good. I went in expecting a horror film, but while this certainly plays around with common tropes of the horror genre, it wants to be an essay on sex and coming out as trans. Which is all very well, but if you’re going to explore themes like that, you need to find a way of bringing along with you those audience members who are neither gay nor trans, however sympathetic they might be to alternative sexualities.
There is nevertheless much to admire here – Anderson is fantastic as the former final girl reminiscent of the reclusive Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), and a great deal of love, care and effort has gone into imagining the (fictional) Camp Miasma series from the ground up, even extending to VHS videotapes and merch. Yet the proceedings are all over the place, and I found myself becoming increasingly bored as the central character of Kris completely failed to engage me.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 21st.
Trailer (Mubi):