© Plan B Entertainment / Mubi
Two days ago, on October 26th, my wife and I received an early Halloween treat. The 37th Singapore International Film Festival showed Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), the new meta-horror movie from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, at the Gallery Theatre in Singapore’s National Museum. We got tickets for the event before it sold out.
This is Schoenbrun’s third movie, following We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), which I haven’t seen, and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which I did see recently while it had a tenure on Singaporean Netflix. It took me two attempts to get into I Saw the TV Glow, but when I adjusted to its wavelength it really impressed me. It’s a haunting and melancholic film about a pair of alienated high school kids (Justice Smith and Jack Haven) and their relationship with a kids’ horror TV show that, ultimately, causes reality to blur into fantasy. When adulthood arrives and reality fails to blur anymore for one of them (Smith), the consequences are tragic. The film has phantasmagorical qualities that sometimes make it feel like a David Lynch movie – if, crucially, David Lynch had grown up in the 1990s rather than the l1950s and 1960s. And its ending is genuinely sad.
I certainly didn’t feel sad after watching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which I found a joyous and life-affirming, and very funny, experience. Crudely, it could be summarised as 1950’s Sunset Boulevard transplanted into the universe of the Friday the 13th movies (1980-2009). A very Friday the 13th-like horror franchise Camp Miasma, wherein countless horny teenagers were bloodily slain by a killer called Little Death (I Saw the TV Glow’s Jack Haven with a box-shaped vent on their head and wielding a humungous spear), made pots of money in the 1980s. Now a studio wants to reboot the franchise but, alas, the movies are today regarded as problematic. The character of Little Death, dismissed at the time as a ‘freak’, is in modern parlance a transgender person.
To handle the project, and to cover their arses, the studio executives commission a young, queer director called Kris Wiliams (Hannah Einbinder), previously responsible for an arthouse film that was a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) told ‘from the perspective of the shower curtain’. They presume she’ll make it woke enough for modern sensibilities.
The earnest, nerdish but very likeable Kris has the idea of casting in her new version of Camp Miasma the actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who’d played the ‘final girl’ in the original movie of the series. Billy has become a recluse and bizarrely lives in the huddle of old summer-camp buildings where that movie was filmed four decades earlier. So, Kris goes to visit her and reality, as in I Saw the TV Glow, begins to blur…
Schoenbrun is obviously a big fan of the 1980s slasher movies that inspired the film. In the opening-credits sequence, there’s a montage of Camp Miasma merchandising and artefacts, including video cassettes of the first movie and its (increasingly shite) sequels. As with Friday the 13th, the sequels include a third instalment filmed in 3D, one called The Final Chapter and a subsequent one called A New Beginning, one where Little Death goes into outer space (Miasma 3000), and one where he tangles with a monster from a rival franchise (Little Death vs Sleepy Man).
© Crystal Lake Entertainment / New Line Cinema
Details elsewhere in the film also indicate how knowledgeable Schoenbrun is about the slasher school of cinema. Billy mentions the unpleasantness of auditioning for the 1981’s The Burning (which was produced by a young Harvey Weinstein). Kris refers to a gutter-press rumour that once circulated about Jamie Lee Curtis, star of the Halloween (1978-2022) franchise. And Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela is alluded to – she appeared in the second and third entries in the Sleepaway Camp series in 1988 and 1989.
All this makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma intriguing because Schoenbrun is transfeminine and non-binary and uses the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’. And notoriously, those old slasher movies that Schoenbrun is a fan of frequently used gender non-conformity and transgender identity as cheap ways to explain their killers being murderously loopy. See the first Sleepaway Camp movie in 1983, or Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) – which, despite its dodgy gender politics, is in my opinion the best slasher movie of the 1980s – or of course, the granddaddy of them all, Psycho.
I started watching the film wondering what it would do with those weary and mean-spirited old tropes. As it turned out, Schoenbrun not only dismantles them but reassembles them and makes something wonderfully fresh out of them. In the process, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma reclaims the slasher sub-genre for an audience that in the past was too often demonised by it.
One particular joy of the film is its performances. Hannah Einbinder makes an engaging central character, clearly a stand-in for Schoenbrun, and sells the idea of somebody fascinated by the slasher sub-genre while simultaneously troubled by its misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. But the film belongs to Gillian Anderson, whose portrayal of Billy Presley is majestic. I’ve read that as a teenager Schoenbrun was a big fan of The X-files (1993-2002, 2016-18), where Anderson found fame playing FBI agent Dana Scully. So, getting her to perform in their movie must feel like a dream come true.
Incidentally, another unwelcome trope in cinema is that of a sad, mad and possibly dangerous female movie star living as a recluse, past her prime and losing her looks. It’s sexist – though if nothing else, it highlights the sexism of the industry around it. Gloria Swanson, who played the washed-out actress Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, was only 50 when the film was made; whereas nobody questioned the right of her co-star William Holden to still be a leading man in 1969’s The Wild Bunch when he was in his fifties. But there’s none of that pathetic-ness about Anderson’s character. Yes, she’s a bit odd at times; but she’s also bold, funny, charismatic, sensual and empathetic. Generally, she’s a joy every time she’s on screen.
Elsewhere in the cast, my wife was delighted to spot Kevin McDonald playing a clerk at a hotel near Billy’s summer-camp abode – McDonald is a member of the Canadian comedy team The Kids in the Hall, whose 1988-95 TV sketch show she’s a big fan of. Another welcome face is that of Patrick Fischler, playing a scary gas-station attendant. Fischler made a small but devastating appearance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) as the nightmare-haunted man who decides to check out what’s really behind the diner he keeps dreaming about and triggers the most frightening moment in the film – actually, for my money, it’s the most frightening moment in Lynch’s career.
© Sante Fe Productions / New World Pictures
I’ll admit, though, to having a few misgivings when I sat down to watch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma because I’m definitely not a fan of 1980s slasher movies. I’d already become a horror fan by the end of the 1970s and, for me, the 1970s were the golden age of the genre. During that decade, you got such classics as The Devils (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Exorcist (1973), Deliverance (1974), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Carrie (1976), Jaws (1976), Suspiria (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Alien (1979). So I was less than enthused when the 1980s arrived and all-of-a-sudden most horror filmmakers seemed interested only in making films wherein dummkopf teenagers get slaughtered by figures in Halloween masks and hockey masks.
For me, the biggest crime of 1980s slashers like He Knows You’re Alone (1980) or Prom Night (1980) or Happy Birthday to Me (1981) or The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was their stultifying lack of imagination. Any display of imagination in the slasher sub-genre seemed to begin and end in the film that kickstarted it, John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) – itself a 1970s movie.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma contains a number of scenes taken from the ‘original’ Camp Miasma movies of the 1980s. Some are stylised re-imaginings of them that are operatic in their gusto and feature extraordinary geysers of blood. But other scenes are meant to be ‘authentic’ ones, which Schoenbrun stages with a convincing, desperate, no-budget 1980s tackiness. I did end up thinking that if I’d been a few years younger at the time, and less in thrall to 1970s horror movies, and the 1980s slashers had seemed like ‘forbidden fruit’ to me – films I was officially too young to watch and I only occasionally saw, furtively, through my fingers, on scratchy VCR recordings – I might have developed an affection for them too. And today I’d enjoy them at least in a so-bad-they’re-good way. (The reality is that I find them so bad they’re annoying.)
Incidentally, I was delighted that Schoenbrun included in their film a reference to 1983’s Videodrome, a horror movie far better than its slasher contemporaries, made by a genuinely visionary filmmaker, David Cronenberg. As an actor, Cronenberg was game enough to appear in Jason X (2000), the entry in the Friday the 13th franchise where, yes, Jason Voorhees goes into outer space.
Lastly, it was a pleasure to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at the Singapore International Festival, surrounded by an enthusiastic and appreciative audience. Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy the film and gave it a much-deserved round of applause at the end.
© Compass International Pictures / Aquarius Releasing