Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens by doing something most horror movies only pretend to do: it builds an entire fake franchise before the story even begins. In the first minutes, Camp Miasma arrives as a fully stocked 1980s slasher series set at a summer camp in the woods, with its own killer, its own sequels and its own shelf of battered pop culture debris.
The franchise’s resident slaughterer is Little Death, who trades a hockey mask for a large, square ceiling vent on the head and carries a double-tipped spear. The opening credits move through old videotape covers, posters and newspaper clippings, then keep going into fake merchandise: a Little Death action figure, a Camp Miasma arcade game, Halloween costumes, trading cards and even a Little Death rap album. It is the kind of invented history that makes the film feel less like a story being introduced than a world being excavated.
That is why the search around horror movies lands here now. Schoenbrun is not just borrowing the look of old genre fare; the film treats Camp Miasma as a franchise with a long commercial life and a fan culture to match. Within that history, the fictional series runs from the woods to outer space and Manhattan, and Billy Preston appears in several sequels as the hero. Billy Preston is played by Gillian Anderson, and the character is now living in seclusion on the rural outskirts of Portland, Oregon, holed up at Camp Tivoli, the abandoned getaway where the original Camp Miasma was filmed.
That is where the nostalgia starts to crack. The film also frames the franchise’s later backlash as a 21st-century reassessment of its darker meaning, because the killer is not just a monster but a traumatized, gender-fluid teen. What once read as beloved campfire gore is now treated as something more troubling, and the movie uses that shift to turn the fake series into an argument about what fandom keeps, what it forgives and what it decides is no longer innocent.
Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young, queer, Sundance-annointed filmmaker hired to bring the zombie IP back to life, while Sarah Sherman plays Billy Preston’s agent, who thinks she is good for a cameo. The setup leaves one question hanging in plain sight: whether Billy Preston will come back for one more chapter or stay hidden at Camp Tivoli, where the old franchise was made and the new one is trying to drag her back into the frame.
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