--- title: "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)" description: "Overstuffed, messy, horny, and somehow made just for me." url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma/ --- ![A still from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma/backdrop.webp) # Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) Aug 21, 2026 | 4 min read | Rated 4 out of 5 | Dir. Jane Schoenbrun Overstuffed, messy, horny, and somehow made just for me. Jane Schoenbrun made a slasher about the exact questions I’ve been turning over in my own life this year, then had the decency to make it a blast. Her first two films were morose, gorgeous, desperate little cries to come out and be yourself. This one already is out, and it’s having a great time. It’s exuberant. It’s horny. It opens on a blood geyser so gleeful I laughed out loud, and it never stops being about the same thing underneath: finding your pleasure, getting back into your own body, chasing what actually lights you up, even if what lights you up is being hunted through the woods in an 80s slasher. Coming to this off a long queer-film binge, a lot of Araki lately, it scratched the same itch I Want Your Sex did. Go find what you want and stop apologizing for it. I needed to hear it. Nobody here gets punished for their desire. The queer women live. Cinema loves to make women and queers pay in blood for wanting pleasure, and Schoenbrun just refuses, letting them want and then survive the wanting, the way The Handmaiden did. And Little Death is an instant horror icon. The masked, spear-wielding vengeful ghost at the center of the fictional franchise looks like what you’d get if Pyramid Head and Jason Voorhees had a baby in a Silent Hill parking lot, and the central kill run at the camp is one of the best sequences of the year, all squishy Foley and go-for-broke splatter. The whole movie has that handmade Lynch quality where the cheapness becomes the dream. Matte paintings, charming garbage effects, a budget held together with love, all of it chasing a feeling instead of accuracy. The sharpest move is that she takes back Sleepaway Camp. The film wears its Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp influences openly, and a trans filmmaker reclaiming the one slasher most infamous for weaponizing transness as its final shock, then turning it tender and funny and hers, is the thing that justifies the whole project. It’s a real tonal shift for her, spooky and genuinely funny, and it plays like someone in a much better place now. Lovely to watch. Where I bumped: the Hollywood machinery. The reboot-industry, agent-office material, Sarah Sherman included, and I love Sarah Sherman, kept pulling me out of the parts I cared about. Kris being a barely-veiled Schoenbrun self-insert is fine, she’s earned the mirror, but the movie-about-making-the-movie layer left me cold. That’s three films now about watching yourself on a screen, and I’d love to see her aim that camera somewhere new. The trans-revenge charge that builds around Little Death also fizzles right when it should detonate, a half-formed idea I wanted finished. And for a love letter to slasher kills, they get samey fast, a lot of the same double-ended-spear, Darth Maul spin. The one great sequence just made me greedy for five more. Like everything she makes, it’s overstuffed, and I mean that fondly. A hundred ideas clawing to get out and a tiny budget to get them out in, so she crams, and I’ll need to sit with it. But here’s her real trick. She makes something so specific to her own weird interior that it loops all the way around to universal, and a horror nerd in the middle of his own questions about pleasure and desire can sit there and think, oh. This one’s mine. This one felt like mine. Stray thoughts: ・Under the gore, this is really an academic deconstruction of the slasher and a meta-breakdown of reboot culture, Jane reckoning with the sexual legacy those 80s movies stamped onto her impressionable kid subconscious. ・I’ve got nothing to compare this to. It doesn’t look or move like anything else I’ve seen. ・Her whole watching-and-being-watched fixation curdles into an actual kink here, the want to watch, be watched, and be hunted. Genuinely new, even if I bumped on it. ・Still no idea what the air vent in the head means. Boxes within boxes, maybe a trapped inner self clawing for air, maybe a conduit for breath and life that’s also the thing sealing the head in. Didn’t crack it, but it’s clearly load-bearing. ・Her riff on a very, very, very not-subtly-Sleepaway-Camp movie was one of the funniest stretches in the film. ・The chest-mounted killgasm at the camp is the standout, the one time the choreography really cooks. ・The Counting Crows needle-drop lost me completely, thematically and story-wise. Fun song, total mystery. ・The final end-credits song, on the other hand, absolutely rips. Gillian Anderson is making enormous vocal choices, some Southern-but-not-quite-Norma-Desmond thing that never pays off as character, and she’s still magnetic, ravenous, coming gorgeously apart. ・Give me an entire Thor spinoff. The poly bi boyfriend deserves his own franchise. ・Overstuffed the way I Love Boosters was this year, and I loved both for having too much to say and no room to say it. Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma/) ## Works on My Machine Get the next post by email. My newsletter covers homelab builds, AI tools and open source, and it goes out when I have something to say. It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. You'll get an email to confirm first. ![Joe Karlsson at his desk, chin on hand, with a microphone in front of him](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/about/collage/studio.webp) Joe Karlsson I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side. [More about me →](https://www.joekarlsson.com/about/) [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joekarlsson.com) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekarlsson/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/JoeKarlsson)