Graphic by Bei Jia Viggiano ’28 via Canva
By JJ Guo ’29
Staff Writer
The tightness in my chest didn’t leave, though it was long after I stepped out of the movie theater. That familiar feeling of anxiety has been crawling behind me ever since I saw "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma."
Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" follows Kris — played by Hannah Einbinder — a young, queer filmmaker hired to reboot “Camp Miasma,” a fictional slasher franchise from the 1980s. Her research eventually leads her to Billy, who is portrayed by Gillian Anderson, the original film’s final girl, who is living in the abandoned campsite where the film was shot. "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" has been described as “a 2026 American satirical surrealist psychological romantic slasher film.” According to those elaborate labels, I should laugh, or scream. While I experienced both of those things, why was it that anxiety lingered the longest?
Part of it is the style choice. The retro, low-grain look and exaggerated gore pays tribute to 80s slasher films; the soundtrack follows suit. Kris’s work and life mirrors the present, while the dreamy, surrealist landscape paints an ideal future. This amalgamation of past, present and future constructs a strange disorientation for the film’s audience.
Scattered through the strangeness are the breadcrumbs we recognize, the unspeakable discomfort of sex, an infuriating Zoom meeting where no one can hear one another and a mindless snack shopping spree at a gas station. These ordinary details of modern life draw us so close that we cannot help but resonate.
This film presented the gap between the amalgamated zone and my own reality. This gap is eternally to be determined, beyond control and without categorization. Struggling to experience sexual pleasure without mentally placing herself inside the fictional world of Camp Miasma, Kris too flounders in this space of in-betweenness.
The anxiety is given a figure and a name in this film: Little Death. Wearing a geometric metal helmet resembling an air vent and a raincoat, Little Death is the slasher who haunts the campsite. Their killing spree is the showpiece of the film, gleefully gory and set — unexpectedly — to the song “A Long December” by Counting Crows. Shifting between the perspective of Little Death, Kris and Billy, the nerve-wracking scene culminates with Little Death piercing the pair during intimacy with a spear. Then, the theater fell silent as my body buzzed with the aftermath of intense anxiety.
At this moment, I remembered what Billy said to Kris. “If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.”
In a Letterboxd interview, Schoenbrun explained this line to be about “exploring things that you know are going to be scary and tender; that you don’t have to be focused on the fact that you have a way to turn it off, but knowing that exists is the only way you’re going to be able to actually be present.” Chased by the slasher of anxiety, I had been holding my breath all my life. When chest tightness became habitual, the choice to exit was faded and forgotten. Yet watching Kris lying in the room, scared and safe all at once, I felt what it might be like to exhale into my own sexuality.
The film keeps rolling. A moment later, Kris and Billy wake. Bathed in blood and tenderness, they go on a snack shopping-spree at the gas station.
Jillian Stammely ’28 contributed fact-checking.
