With a title like Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Jane Schoenbrun’s third film is designed to get your blood pumping. But the word “frigid”—in all its complicated connotations—might be a more apt description of Schoenbrun’s third feature film.
Historically, slasher movies are all heat: the unrelenting desert sun of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the late summer sweat of Friday the 13th. But Teenage Sex and Death takes place in the dead of winter. We meet Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a “Sundance wunderkind” tasked with remaking the titular fictional ’80s slasher franchise, a problematic cult classic that Hollywood wants to reboot for younger, queerer audiences. Kris journeys to the movie’s iced-over summer camp to track down its original final girl, Billy (Gillian Anderson), and convince her to star in the remake. Something else is driving her too: The fictional slasher was a sexual awakening for Kris when she was young and now, in genre parlance, she’s back to finish the job.
The “final girl,” the last survivor who rises up to best the killer, is a stock character in the slasher lexicon. The term first appears in Carol J. Clover’s 1987 article “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” and resurfaces in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws five years later. An academic steeped in the psychoanalytic tradition, Clover identified many of the slasher tropes we’re familiar with today, all in service of a knotty theory of gender, violence, and identification on screen. She saw the OG slasher movie as “body cinema” in much the same way pornography is: It hits the flesh first. It gets the juices flowing. With porn, you might watch an actor from a distance and want to touch them, or imagine you are them. A slasher, Clover argues, with its shaky camera moving first from the POV of the killer, his lurid gaze upon the girl, before switching to her perspective as she develops from victim to victor, is much the same. This blurring of identifications—from subject to object, male to female, viewer to watched—is part of what makes these movies so enticing despite their conventions, according to Clover, like a fantasy we return to again and again.
Clover’s theories, especially about the ways in which the genre tropes and cinematic feints of the slasher blur gender boundaries, loom large in Schoenbrun’s work. The director, who identifies as queer and uses they/them pronouns, has been able to articulate a distinctly Millennial and Gen Z queer experience of overidentification with media. Horror, in its many incarnations, also touches their previous two features, first with an Internet creepypasta in the 2021 microbudget We Are All Going to the World’s Fair and second with a Buffy-style TV series in I Saw the TV Glow, 2024. Through it all, Schoenbrun thoughtfully and generously explores tendencies that a Freudian might call repression. When asked if they like boys or girls, Owen, the protagonist of I Saw the TV Glow just shakes their head and stammers, “I don’t know … I think that I like TV shows.”
What starts as a two-hander between Kris and Billy shifts to a story-within-a-story as the pair watch the original Camp Miasma together before things eventually devolve into something resembling a dream, rooted in the women’s complicated feelings surrounding sex. The lack of reality is compounded by painted backdrops, which stand in for the forest around the cabin.
Schoenbrun is at their best when conveying this sense of dissociation and comfort in pop culture. In Teenage Sex and Death, they render the feeling of watching yourself from the outside compellingly, and Einbinder, too, plays Kris’s fraught relationship to sex and fantasy with both wit and guilelessness. (Kris may be comfortable with her queerness, but she still struggles to open herself up to pleasure with others, in no small part thanks to a latent fetish tinged by the Camp Miasma movies.) I Saw the TV Glow, like so many young and hungry filmmakers’ first studio movies, is plum stuffed with haunting images that must have lived in Schoenbrun’s head their entire life before leaping onscreen. But Teenage Sex and Death relies on preexisting images from film culture to evoke and metatextually iterate on the voyeuristic ids of touchstone male directors. The characters, too, explicitly dissect the films that have come before (Sleepaway Camp and its transphobic tropes are called out by name). The effect feels more like a long film essay than a feature, enunciated rather than performed.
Horror fanatics will be able to gobble up the ’80s film references with the same glee that Kris and Billy munch on fried chicken and gummy worms. Two split diopter shots harken to Brian De Palma. (His Dressed to Kill, from 1980, draws both on trans panic and a formative artistic experience: gathering evidence of his father’s infidelity by filming it. For directors like De Palma and Michael Powell, whose 1960 film Peeping Tom some consider the proto-slasher, the unstable distinctions between the leering male gaze, an eroticizing glance, and the perverse desire to watch violence onscreen are baked into art form itself.) Meanwhile, Einbinder’s barely-clothed streak through the woods recalls Sam Raimi’s rapist trees in The Evil Dead. Another swooping camera move is lifted from Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of the original Freudian horror movie, Psycho.
All three of those directors drew upon the unbridled desires of directors before them (Hitchcock, obviously, casts a shadow), but, in the process, they articulated something new. Teenage Sex and Death over-articulates, belaboring its points with unambiguous dialogue (“You’re all characters in a movie!” Kris blurts over a Zoom call to her film’s producers) and genre fan-service. Kris and Billy, played by two queer icons of their respective generations, discuss their desires nakedly, but rarely do they feel real. The film is so self-consciously constructed that, like its protagonist (who can’t let herself go enough to come), there’s little pleasure beyond the recognition of references to other films.
Ultimately, the dissociative chilliness and devotion to the power of The Image are part of the project for Schoenbrun. After all, for many people, you are what you watch. But by relying too heavily on stilted extended discussions, relentless allusions, and visual artifice, Teenage Sex and Death ultimately keeps the audience from getting closer to its protagonists. Characterizations of both Kris and Billy feel thin, in no small part because Schoenbrun seems unwilling to engage with a world outside of these reference-laden sexualities. In this way, Teenage Sex and Death offers little new to desire or identify with. (It’s perhaps telling that, when I and a few fellow queer and zillennial editors walked out of the screening, we were all left feeling… very little.)
For all its superficial provocations, Teenage Sex and Death backs away from the question of taboo. Kris herself acknowledges that the slasher genre was forged in misogynistic and transphobic representations, playing upon those fantasies. But the movie is reticent to admit the ways that those very cadences may still impact our desires, especially in the realms of BDSM and roleplay. (To really hammer the point home, the killer in the original Camp Miasma movies is named ‘Little Death.’) As the two characters become intimate, Billy soothingly affirms Kris that this friction between violence and desire can always be reduced to “play.” But the movie shies away from a more direct reckoning with the realities of (role)play before the audience can consider whether or not that is true.
In a generation deemed sexless, having a prominent filmmaker who can sensitively explore the things that may make us feel disconnected from our bodies or each other is essential. But without the hypnagogic tone of their previous two films, Schoenbrun creates little space for interpretation. If both sex and cinema are about expressing things that can’t simply be said, Teenage Sex and Death hesitates, still too self-aware to let its fantasies speak for themselves.
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