Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature-length project already has the best title in horror this year, or any other genre for that matter: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Starring Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbeinder, the film seems to be sticking close to Schoenbrun’s focus on media and how it shapes identity. This time around, the slasher steps into the spotlight.
Here’s the official synopsis:
After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic young director for resurrection. But when she visits the original movie’s star, a now-reclusive actress shrouded in mystery, the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.
Sounds like there’s a lot of metafiction floating around here, though not necessarily of the Scream variety (with all due respect to Ghost Face). If Schoenbrun’s first film, We’re All Going to The World’s Fair, was about how media can make finding one’s identity a horror story, and I Saw The TV Glow was about how creepy YA television series can help shape identities that invite the weird with open arms, this latest project is hinting at an exploration of the stock we put in horror franchises and their characters and actors in defining ourselves (consider what Neve Campbell and Jamie Lee Curtis mean to their respective franchises).
Schoenbrun is one of the most innovative and powerful voices in horror right now. To watch one of their movies is to acknowledge there’s nothing else out there like it. They approach nostalgia with a kind of accessible and inclusive spirit that rewards those of their generation while celebrating and questioning the horror genre in the 90s and early 2000s.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which is set for release on August 7th, 2026, certainly falls in line with Schoenbrun’s horror sensibilities thus far. Now, it does enter into one of the genre’s most crowded spaces. Slashers have been done in every way, shape, and form imaginable, from traditional to experimental to metafictional. But it hasn’t been done the Schoenbrun way. This alone makes it one of the most anticipated horror movies of the year.
