Gillian Anderson playing a reclusive former scream queen opposite Hannah Einbinder in a bloody, psychosexual queer slasher? We’re listening.
The wonderfully titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma comes from writer and director Jane Schoenbrun, the trans filmmaker behind I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. This time, Schoenbrun is taking on the familiar summer-camp slasher and reworking it into something much queerer, stranger and more intimate.
What Is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma About?
Einbinder, best known for playing Ava Daniels on Hacks, stars as Kris, a young queer filmmaker hired to resurrect Camp Miasma, a fictional horror franchise that has been churning out increasingly uninspired sequels since the 1980s. Kris becomes determined to recruit Billie Presley, the actor who survived the original movie as its “final girl.”
For anyone who didn’t grow up studying horror tropes, the final girl is the last woman left standing in a slasher movie, usually after watching everyone around her meet a spectacularly gruesome end.
Played by Anderson, Billie has long since disappeared from Hollywood and now lives in isolation at the abandoned camp where the original film was made. When Kris tracks her down, the relationship between the young director and the former horror icon begins to blur the lines between creative obsession, sexual desire and something considerably more dangerous.
The premise alone would earn the film a place on our queer watchlist, but its cast makes it even harder to resist. Alongside Anderson and Einbinder, the movie features Eva Victor, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Quintessa Swindell and nonbinary actor Jack Haven, plus Sarah Sherman, Zach Cherry and Amanda Fix.
A Queer Reinvention of the Summer-Camp Slasher
Schoenbrun is not simply adding queer characters to an old slasher formula. The film digs into the genre’s history of presenting transness and gender nonconformity as frightening or monstrous, while exploring desire, shame and the complicated experience of learning to feel at home in your own body.
The result is a movie that appears ready to be campy, horny, gruesome and emotionally unsettling, sometimes all at once. In other words, it understands the assignment.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it opened the Un Certain Regard program and won the Queer Palm. The film opened in U.S. theaters on August 7 through MUBI.
Watch the official trailor here.
