‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Cannes Review: The Final Girl Theory

If one were to sum up Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in a single sentence, it might go something like this: it’s MUBI’s answer to Netflix’s Stranger Things — the arty, queer, analytically rigorous version of the retro-eighties genre revival that Stranger Things helped reignite. If that show feels like it was conceived by enthusiastic horror fans in their first year of college, Jane Schoenbrun’s series is the graduate seminar paper on the same subject. The gap in complexity is enormous. So is the gap in results.

Schoenbrun comes to this project with two cult films behind them — We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow — works that push against accessibility with their dense weave of obscure pop references, extreme stylistic choices, and analytical undercurrents that circle obsessively around questions of gender and popular culture. By comparison, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is relatively approachable: a meta-upon-meta love letter to the horror films of the 1980s, and to the slasher cycle in particular. What Schoenbrun does, in essence, is invent a fictional franchise in the vein of Halloween and then attempt to resurrect it — in a manner that might be loosely described as postmodern, though that word barely scratches the surface.

The franchise-within-the-series is called Camp Miasma, its serial killer known as Little Death — a mythic creature that lurks at the bottom of a lake and hunts with a spear — and it follows the familiar arc of so many horror properties: early success, diminishing sequels, self-aware reinventions, and the inevitable reboots that began proliferating in the last decade. Schoenbrun takes considerable pleasure in satirizing this ecosystem of what they call «zombie IPs» — characters kept on permanent life support, neither truly alive nor allowed to die, ready to be revived the moment a studio smells money.

The story centers on Kris (Hannah Einbinder, of Hacks), an indie filmmaker who broke through with a cult horror film — described, wonderfully, as «Psycho told from the perspective of the shower curtain» — and who is now being courted by a studio to resurrect the Camp Miasma saga. She travels to the middle of nowhere to meet Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s final girl: an actress who vanished from public life after that eighties moment of fame and has since retreated to the very location where the original was shot. The encounter between the two women sets everything else in motion.

What follows is genuinely difficult to categorize. It’s a horror story, a lesbian romance, a sustained critical essay on the politics of slasher cinema — particularly its retrograde gender politics and, in the case of Camp Miasma, its explicitly anti-trans undercurrents — and a sharp Hollywood satire. But it’s also a psychological portrait of a protagonist who has more films in her head than lived experiences, more fictional references than actual physical sensations. There’s a reason Little Death doubles as a French idiom for orgasm: the series draws a direct and unembarrassed line between sex, death, desire, and pleasure in a way that suggests Schoenbrun has done their time with Freud and found it generative rather than exhausting.

As the episodes progress, Schoenbrun pushes further and further into territory that is simultaneously campy, absurdist, and strangely moving. There’s a sustained recreation of the original Camp Miasma film — complete with knowing cameos from familiar genre faces and one genuinely wild, gore-drenched sequence set, inexplicably and perfectly, to a Counting Crows song — before the series shifts registers entirely, moving from the theoretical and satirical toward something rawer and, in its own odd way, sensual. The strange intimacy that develops between the two leads becomes the emotional engine of the whole thing.

The relationship between sex, death, and the cinematic gaze has been theorized exhaustively, from Hitchcock to De Palma and back again. What Schoenbrun brings to that tradition is an unmistakably queer angle — transforming Teenage Sex and Death… into a kind of rereading of those film-theory classics, at once parodic and genuinely erotic, an in-joke for the well-initiated and a vivid, sincere tribute to the genre films that shaped so many of us in adolescence, even when we couldn’t quite say how.