When looking at the upcoming movies on the 2026 movie calendar, everything about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has me excited. For one thing, the title sounds deliciously campy. Then there’s the cast, with Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder starring alongside Gillian Anderson, and the fact that this is Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to 2024’s haunting and hypnotic I Saw the TV Glow. What’s not to love? Critics don’t seem to know the answer to that question either, because reviews are calling this one “a bountiful meal of pleasure and excess.”
The plot of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma sounds like so much fun, with queer filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) hired to remake a classic slasher. Kris becomes obsessed with casting the original film’s reclusive final girl (Gillian Anderson), and a whole new kind of horror film emerges. Laura Venning of Empire gives it a perfect 5 out of 5 in her Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review, calling it “utterly unique” and “exhilaratingly entertaining”:
Miasma is a deliciously rich and cine-literate text, and to distil its innumerate references and layers of psychosexual meaning into a few words is a fool’s errand. Perhaps it would collapse under the weight of itself without its compelling and surprisingly tender lead performances, Einbinder concealing a profound loneliness beneath an uptight exterior and Anderson playing Billy with just the right degree of campy Southern Belle without losing a sense of her humanity. … This is a more joyful, funny and literally visceral embrace of queerness and the strange, violent things that get us off.
Alison Mattingly of Nerdist also rates it 5 stars out of 5, calling it a “transformative work of queer cinema.” This upcoming LGBTQ+ movie is Jane Schoenbrun’s most impactful and brilliant project yet, Mattingly says, cementing their place as one of the most interesting and important filmmakers of our time. The critic continues:
In the same way that Gillian Anderson prepares an elegant feast of KFC for Einbinder’s director in the movie, Schoenbrun delivers the audience a bountiful meal of pleasure and excess on an arthouse silver platter. It is a perfect metaphor for the slasher sub-genre of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and Schoenbrun’s exploration of forbidden desire and the complex relationship between queer identity and sex. After all, as Anderson’s character so plainly puts it, these films are about two things– flesh and fluids.
For Witney Seibold of SlashFilm, it’s an 8.5 out of 10. The critic says if each decade has its own dissertation on the slasher, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an essay for the 2020s’ exploration of the sexual realities that rest within this horror subgenre. Seibold writes:
The film is heartfelt, but whimsical. Heady, yet breezy. It aims to find a new critical path we can follow into our favorite trash media, and actually finds one. This is a new type of film for a new generation. And it's needed. Wes Craven's Scream sought to dissect slashers, and featured characters who were well-versed in horror movies. But even Scream is 30 f***ing years old at this point. ... Schoenbrun now made a movie about a young queer character whose takeaway from slashers has less to do with media savvy than with emotional honesty. The '90s were a long time ago.
Lindsey Bahr of the AP gives the film 3 out of 4 stars, despite not being sure how much she enjoyed the film. Camp Miasma seems so personal to the filmmaker that Bahr struggled to review it. In the end, she surmises that the movie is ultimately about sex, titillation and orgasm, she says:
What it’s not really is a grisly slasher; The murders are cartoonish, with blood spurting out of victims’ necks like a geyser. Instead, it’s a thoughtfully constructed fever dream that wears its high and low brow references on its sleeve — a bold and worthy vision that continues Schoenbrun’s exploration of transitioning using the cinematic and pop cultural tools at their disposal and reinventing them in their image.
Meagna Navarro of Bloody Disgusting says Gillian Anderson gives a career-best performance in the upcoming horror film, and the chemistry sizzles between Billy and Hannah Einbinder’s Kris. The critic notes a few bumps in the road, but overall it’s an exploration of Jane Schoenbrun’s fears through the “loving lens of horror.” Navarro gives it 3.5 skulls out of 5, writing:
Once the climax arrives, though, Schoenbrun seems unsure how to finish (pun intended?), tacking on a muddled saccharine ending that veers a little too off the rails. It’s also overlong and prone to a few lulls in pacing for a film that’s fairly straightforward with a simple concept. But it is Schoenbrun’s most accessible feature yet, while sacrificing none of the artistry. Fantasy and reality blur in breathtaking, whimsical, and jubilant ways in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, using film theory as the launchpad for a dazzling sexual awakening allegory.
This sounds like a really fun and very interesting film. It’s already gotten a lot of buzz from critics, who have given it an overall Certified Fresh 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. I was already looking forward to Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow, and reading what critics have to say has only gotten me more excited. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma hits theaters Friday, August 7.
