A great horror movie delights and torments at once — the tingly, visceral charge that has long drawn audiences to films like Scream and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Director Jane Schoenbrun leans into that latent eroticism in a highly anticipated third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a slasher comedy arriving August 7.
The film stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a Sundance darling turned franchise director trying to reboot the fictional Camp Miasma series — a Friday the 13th–style property in which a murderous entity called Little Death picks off teen counselors at a sleepaway camp.
Kris travels to an isolated compound in search of Billy Presley, the franchise’s original final girl, who has hidden from public view since the first film. What she finds there sets the story’s queer, comic nightmare in motion.
Schoenbrun, like Kris, broke through with Sundance hits: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), two indie horrors that probed gender dysphoria and identity.
This time the filmmaker set out to embrace joy, describing the movie as one best “enjoyed by a bunch of gay people being together, hooting and hollering.” Rather than mining otherness, Camp Miasma revels in the pleasures of gender and sexuality — a shift Schoenbrun frames as moving from a wail into a laugh.
