Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

Jane Schoenbrun opens Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma with a premise that could have gone wrong in about four different directions at once. A flagging horror franchise. A young director hired to drag it back to life. A reclusive former star lured out of hiding for one more turn in the role that apparently ruined her. On paper it reads like a checklist for the kind of self-satisfied meta-slasher that spends more time congratulating itself than scaring anyone. I sat down expecting winks to camera and got something considerably stranger.

Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, the writer-director brought in to resurrect the Camp Miasma series after years of diminishing sequels, and Gillian Anderson plays Billy, the actress who once embodied its most famous final girl and has spent the decades since avoiding any mention of it. Watching two performers circle each other with this much restraint, neither one giving away what she actually wants from the encounter, is a small pleasure in itself. Anderson underplays Billy so completely that her stillness starts to feel like its own kind of threat. Einbinder, an actress I know almost entirely from comic work, finds a hunger here that has nothing to do with punchlines, and it is the more unsettling performance for it.

Schoenbrun shoots the abandoned camp itself as something closer to a nervous system than a backdrop, all rot and sickly green light, and refuses to let the horror sit there decoratively while the human drama happens elsewhere.

Where the film loses some of its grip, in my opinion, is the final stretch, where the psychosexual elements start to elbow out the character work that made the opening hour so absorbing. A couple of scenes reach for shock in places where dread would have done the job with less noise.

I walked out admiring the film rather more than I loved it, and that is a good film in its own right, confidently made and genuinely unsettling where it earns the right to be, even if it never quite resolves what it set out to dig into.