Jane Schoenbrun takes the slasher film apart, rummages through its blood-soaked history and rebuilds it as something stranger, funnier and unexpectedly tender. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma pairs Hannah Einbinder with a gloriously enigmatic Gillian Anderson for a queer horror story about desire, fear, filmmaking and the movies that get under our skin.
Film details
- Title: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
- Premiere date in the Netherlands: 20 August 2026
- Director: Jane Schoenbrun
- Runtime: 112 minutes
- Genre: Horror, comedy, romance
- Countries: United States, Canada
- Language: English
- Subtitles: Dutch
- Age rating: 16+
- Cast: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Amanda Fix, Arthur Conti, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman and Patrick Fischler
- Where to watch in Rotterdam: KINO, LantarenVenster and Cinerama
- Special outdoor screening: Pleinbios on 26 August
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What’s the vibe?
The once-beloved Camp Miasma slasher franchise has been milked through years of bad sequels, so ambitious filmmaker Kris gets the job of bringing it back from the dead. Her research leads her to Billy Presley, the reclusive actress who survived the original film as its famous final girl.
Billy now lives at the abandoned camp where the movie was filmed. Sensible.
What begins as research develops into an intense relationship between the two women, while Kris becomes increasingly consumed by the mythology that shaped her ideas about sex, fear and herself.
Schoenbrun treats the fictional franchise with such obsessive detail that Camp Miasma starts feeling like a real piece of 1980s horror history. Then the distinction between movie, memory, fantasy and reality begins to get wonderfully messy.
Trailer
Check out the trailer below.
Why you might like it
- Eyes: Retro slasher imagery, psychedelic horror, fake 1980s movie memorabilia and plenty of lovingly constructed bloodshed.
- Heart: Beneath the knives and meta jokes is an unexpectedly warm story about desire, vulnerability and learning to stop analysing yourself long enough to actually feel something.
- Mind: The film tackles how horror can shape identity, how audiences reclaim troubling art and whether our favourite films need to be morally tidy before they are allowed to mean something to us.
Critical reception.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has become one of the best-reviewed horror films of 2026. Rotten Tomatoes currently gives it 96% from 189 critic reviews, alongside a 79% audience score from more than 250 ratings. Critics particularly praise its mix of slasher homage, queer self-discovery and sincere affection for cinema.
Metacritic is even more enthusiastic, giving the film 89 out of 100 from 47 reviews, placing it in the site's "universal acclaim" category. Forty-five of those reviews are positive, two are mixed and none are classified as negative.
The Guardian awarded the film five stars and praised Gillian Anderson's performance and Schoenbrun's transformation of slasher conventions into something liberating and deeply strange. Dutch newspaper NRC gave it four stars.
The film opened the Un Certain Regard section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win the Queer Palm. It did not win one of the main Un Certain Regard jury prizes, but leaving Cannes with its own Palm is hardly a disappointing camping trip.
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Scene to watch for
Watch the sequence where Kris and Billy sit together and revisit the original Camp Miasma.
It is more than a film-within-a-film joke. You are watching two women interpret exactly the same images through completely different memories, desires and experiences. Their conversation gradually tells you why the old slasher matters so much to Kris, and why Billy's relationship with it is considerably more complicated.
Also keep an eye on Little Death, the fictional franchise's masked killer. The bizarre mask was inspired by an air vent, which may permanently lower the emotional neutrality of ceilings.
Recommended pairing
Go full summer-camp horror with toasted marshmallows, salty snacks and something cold to drink before the screening. A picnic works particularly well if you are heading to the outdoor Pleinbios screening.
Afterwards, take a late walk with friends and discuss which horror film permanently rewired your brain when you were younger. Maybe avoid doing this near a lake.
Need-to-knows
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the third film in what Schoenbrun calls their Screen Trilogy, following We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Each film explores, in very different ways, what happens when media becomes tangled up with identity.
The fictional Camp Miasma franchise was built in remarkable detail. The filmmakers created fake sequels, VHS releases, merchandise, games and decades of invented cultural history so the series would feel like a genuine horror property audiences somehow forgot existed.
The film draws heavily on the history of the 1980s slasher, with KINO specifically pointing to the controversial Sleepaway Camp from 1983 as an important reference point. Rather than simply copying the genre, Schoenbrun uses those conventions to examine who gets turned into the monster, who becomes the victim and how later generations reinterpret troubling stories they still love.
The Dutch Kijkwijzer rating is 16, with warnings for fear, violence and coarse language. The international rating also flags gore, sexual content, graphic nudity and drug use, so the cute summer-camp setting should not be mistaken for a gentle nostalgic comedy.
