Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) is ostensibly about resurrecting an exhausted slasher franchise. More importantly, it resurrects an old question about horror spectatorship: who, exactly, is doing the looking when women and queer viewers watch horror?

The film’s achievement is not simply that it places female and queer desire at the centre of a slasher. It allows its desiring spectator to move between positions that conventional discussions of cinematic looking have often treated as opposites: watcher and watched, killer and victim, aggressor and Final Girl, subject and object. In doing so, Camp Miasma produces something more specific than a female gaze. It dramatises a female and queer fan gaze, shaped not only by desire but by repetition, memory, identification and decades of accumulated horror fandom.

This also makes the film an unusually effective cultural bridge between Generation X and Generation Z. Schoenbrun takes the cinematic vocabulary inherited from the slasher boom and VHS culture of the late twentieth century and places it in conversation with a younger fan culture accustomed to interrogating gender, sexuality, trauma, identity and the politics of representation. Yet Camp Miasma does not insist that younger viewers reject the pleasures of older horror in order to critique them. The sex, blood, killer point-of-view, eroticised danger and Final Girl remain.

What changes is who is permitted to own them.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was written and directed by Schoenbrun and stars Hannah Einbinder as queer filmmaker Kris Williams and Gillian Anderson as Billy Presley, the reclusive star of the original fictional Camp Miasma. Jack Haven plays its masked killer, Little Death. The film opened the Un Certain Regard programme at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it subsequently won the Queer Palm. Cannes and MUBI list the completed film at 112 minutes. MUBI began its US theatrical release on 7 August 2026, initially in limited release before a wider expansion later that month.

The premise itself makes the relationship between generations of horror explicit. Kris is an emerging filmmaker commissioned to revive the apparently exhausted Camp Miasma franchise, a piece of what the film jokingly treats as “zombie IP”. Her earlier success was an extraordinarily academic-sounding reinterpretation of Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain. She is precisely the sort of contemporary filmmaker who understands that the cultural object she loves is also ideologically compromised.

Her search for something authentic beneath the reboot machinery brings her to Billy, the original film’s Final Girl, who has retreated to the former camp where the film was shot. Billy does not simply remember Camp Miasma. She appears almost to inhabit its remains. The location consequently becomes an archive in which cinema, memory, sexuality and fantasy coexist.

The fictional franchise revolves around Little Death, a spear-wielding killer associated with the lake and with a history of gendered persecution. Contemporary descriptions of the film consistently note the deliberately problematic trans or gender-nonconforming coding embedded within the fictional franchise’s mythology. Schoenbrun is not accidentally reproducing that history. The film makes Kris explicitly conscious of it.

Even Little Death’s name collapses sex and horror into one idea. “Little Death” invokes la petite mort, the long-established French expression associated with orgasm, something Schoenbrun and contemporary commentators have explicitly connected to the film.

The killer is therefore already both sexual and lethal before Kris ever enters the camp.

That doubleness is fundamental to the film.

Laura Mulvey’s foundational 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” used psychoanalysis to examine the ways mainstream narrative cinema had been structured through patriarchal patterns of looking and sexual difference. Her formulation became central to subsequent discussions of the “male gaze”, particularly the distinction between active looking and the woman constructed as spectacle. The bibliographic details of the original essay are confirmed by Oxford Academic: Screen, volume 16, issue 3, Autumn 1975, pages 6–18.

The slasher, however, made the relationship between gender and spectatorship considerably messier.

Carol J. Clover’s “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”, published in Representations in 1987 and later developed through Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992), challenged the idea that the slasher spectator could be understood simply as a male viewer sadistically identifying with a male killer. Clover demonstrated the importance of the Final Girl and, crucially, the mobility of identification within horror. The spectator can be placed alongside the killer before increasingly experiencing terror and survival through the Final Girl. The original article appeared in Representations, no. 20, pages 187–228, while Princeton University Press published Men, Women, and Chain Saws in 1992.

Horror spectatorship can therefore migrate.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes that migration and makes it sexual.

The film announces the importance of looking from its opening. Sight and Sound notes that the film begins through an unstable point of view on the set of the original Camp Miasma, before someone on the film crew effectively fits the spectator with Little Death’s apparatus. The New Yorker likewise describes the opening as being seen from Little Death’s perspective. We are apparently inhabiting the killer’s gaze, yet we are simultaneously being shown the manufacture of that gaze on a film set.

The spectator is therefore placed inside the killer and outside the movie at the same time.

That destabilisation continues throughout the film. Kris watches Camp Miasma. Billy and Kris watch it. We watch them watching it. The fictional franchise repeatedly interrupts the supposedly “real” film, until the distinction between spectator, performer and character becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is where the female fan gaze becomes considerably more interesting than a simple inversion of Mulvey.

A female gaze need not mean that women merely replace men as the people entitled to look. Camp Miasma proposes something stranger. Its characters want access to the entire mechanism of looking. The erotic power lies partly in the ability to move between seeing and being seen.

The film makes that idea extraordinarily literal through the sequence from the original Camp Miasma that has haunted Kris since childhood.

Young Kris watches the fictional movie as Little Death approaches Squeak, Billy’s character, during a sexual encounter. Schoenbrun has explicitly discussed this scene through Freud’s concept of the “primal scene”: the destabilising encounter with sexuality before the child fully understands what is being witnessed. In Schoenbrun’s account, Kris watches Squeak experiencing ecstasy and terror simultaneously and experiences an awakening of her own desire.

Another description of the sequence identifies its most striking image: Little Death raising the spear reflected in Squeak’s eye as sexual climax and impending death converge.

That image contains the entire argument of the film.

Kris is fascinated by Billy/Squeak, but she is also fascinated by Little Death looking at Billy/Squeak.

She wants the Final Girl.

She wants to understand the Final Girl.

She wants to inhabit the Final Girl.

But she also wants access to the gaze that sees the Final Girl.

This is where Camp Miasma becomes particularly valuable to the discussion of female horror fandom. It refuses to sanitise the female spectator’s pleasure by insisting that feminist identification must remain exclusively with the endangered woman.

The female horror fan does not have to stand outside the monster.

She can be both.

That proposition brings Schoenbrun remarkably close to Clover while simultaneously pushing Clover’s model into explicitly erotic territory. The spectator’s movement between killer and victim no longer concerns fear alone. Desire moves with it.

The female fan gaze is therefore different from a straightforward female gaze because fandom introduces something else: repetition.

Kris has lived with these images.

She has replayed them.

They have become part of her imaginative vocabulary.

The original Camp Miasma is not merely an ideological object for her to analyse. It is something that participated in the construction of her sexuality.

This is an important distinction because the contemporary fan is perfectly capable of recognising that a beloved cultural object is problematic while simultaneously acknowledging that it remains pleasurable. Kris knows the franchise’s treatment of gender is troubling. She understands why a studio wants someone like her to rehabilitate it. She knows the commercial cynicism of hiring a queer independent filmmaker to make compromised intellectual property culturally acceptable again.

And she still loves Camp Miasma.

That contradiction is not a weakness in the film’s argument.

It is the argument.

Schoenbrun has repeatedly discussed their complicated relationship with the history of gender deviance in horror. In an August 2026 interview, they specifically returned to Psycho and the historical construction of the gender-deviant killer, explaining their desire to queer the inherited rules of horror rather than pretend that history never existed.

Little Death becomes central to that reclamation.

The solution to transphobic or gender-phobic horror history is not simply to delete the monster.

Schoenbrun asks whether the monster can be reclaimed.

The same principle applies to female spectatorship. The solution to decades of women being pursued through slasher films is not necessarily to abolish the pursuit. The fantasy can instead become something whose positions are consciously entered, exchanged and controlled.

The victim can become the monster.

The spectator can become the victim.

The person being watched can also possess the look.

And desire can exist across all of those positions.

There is unusually strong production evidence that this interrogation of the gaze was deliberate rather than something imposed retrospectively upon the film. Costume designer Kendra Terpenning recalled Einbinder saying that they wanted to explore “the female gaze for the female gaze” while constructing the film’s Final Girl imagery. Terpenning also explained that the costume work deliberately referenced the original Friday the 13th.

That statement is important because it identifies a female gaze operating at both ends of the cinematic exchange.

The image is consciously constructed around female looking, but it is also offered to a spectator whose desire is not presumed to be heterosexual and male.

Yet Camp Miasma goes still further.

Its female and queer gaze does not merely eroticise another body differently. It interrogates the pleasure of being the eroticised body. Agency is located not only in looking but in choosing to enter the fantasy of vulnerability.

That distinction matters enormously in horror.

The Final Girl is meaningful because she is vulnerable.

Remove the killer and there is no chase.

Remove danger and there is no survival.

Remove the possibility of becoming the victim and the approaching weapon loses its charge.

The film therefore refuses an easy version of empowerment in which female agency simply means that a woman becomes invulnerable. Instead, vulnerability itself can become part of fantasy when the fantasising subject possesses the ability to move between its positions.

This reaches its fullest expression in the film’s climactic fusion of sex, blood, killing and rebirth.

Contemporary descriptions of the finale consistently emphasise that Kris’s difficulty with sexual presence is bound to dissociation and fantasy. The climactic encounter with Billy consequently does not simply provide Kris with conventional romantic fulfilment. Horror fantasy and sexual experience collapse into one another. Little Death’s imagery becomes part of an orgasmic symbolic death and rebirth rather than an interruption of sexuality.

Schoenbrun has described Camp Miasma as emerging from a deeply personal relationship between transition, embodiment and learning how to experience sex. The filmmaker has also characterised the slasher itself as a genre fundamentally preoccupied with sex.

This is why the film’s sex and violence cannot usefully be separated.

Schoenbrun’s own visual research was divided into two categories: “Flesh”, drawing upon erotic cinema, and “Fluids”, drawing upon blood, guts and horror.

The structure of the research is effectively the structure of the finished film.

Flesh and fluids.

Sex and death.

Victim and killer.

Looking and being looked at.

None cancels the other.

The female body is consequently not rescued from horror imagery.

It takes possession of horror imagery.

That may be Camp Miasma’s most significant contribution to discussions of the female fan gaze. One possible response to exploitative cinematic looking is prohibition: do not eroticise female vulnerability, do not place the camera with the killer, do not sexualise the chase, do not make the threatened body beautiful.

Schoenbrun asks a more uncomfortable question.

What happens when the person who has historically been designated the object wants access to the entire apparatus?

Why can she not possess the knife as well as the scream?

Why can she not enjoy the Final Girl and the killer?

Why must female spectatorship become respectable before it is allowed to become feminist?

This is also where Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma creates its bridge between Gen X and Gen Z.

That claim requires some precision.

It would be factually incorrect to describe Hannah Einbinder as Gen Z. Einbinder was born in 1995 and is normally placed at the younger end of the Millennial generation, while Gillian Anderson, born in 1968, falls comfortably within conventional definitions of Generation X. The generational relationship in Camp Miasma is therefore better understood culturally rather than literally.

Billy embodies the inherited slasher.

Kris embodies its contemporary rereading.

Billy belongs to the world of the original horror object: physical sets, campgrounds, bodies, sex, blood and the material history of filmmaking. Kris approaches that object through another cultural vocabulary: reboot culture, queer representation, problematic media, critical theory, independent filmmaking and an acute awareness of the ideological implications of images.

The film does not ask us to decide which of them is correct.

Instead, they desire one another.

That is crucial.

A less interesting film could have constructed Billy as the embarrassing past and Kris as the enlightened present. The old slasher would then become something to be corrected by the younger filmmaker. Alternatively, the film could have mocked contemporary criticism by presenting Kris as an oversensitive intellectual who simply needs to learn that old horror was better.

Schoenbrun does neither.

Kris’s criticisms are legitimate.

Her desire is legitimate too.

The film allows both statements to remain true.

This creates an unexpectedly useful model for the relationship between generations of horror fans. Many Gen X spectators encountered slasher cinema through theatrical screenings, television and particularly VHS culture before terms such as “male gaze”, “intersectionality”, “queer spectatorship”, “toxic representation” and “trauma-informed” became ordinary components of popular online discussion. Pleasure often preceded theory.

For Gen Z horror fandom, theory is far harder to separate from the experience of watching. Social media, fan communities, video essays, podcasts and online criticism mean that discussions of representation, sexuality, gender, consent and trauma can accompany the film almost immediately.

Camp Miasma refuses to declare either mode of fandom illegitimate.

Instead, Billy and Kris meet inside the horror movie.

The older cultural relationship to the slasher provides something the younger spectator still wants: bodily excess, danger, sexuality, fantasy and permission to enjoy something disreputable.

The younger relationship provides something equally important: the vocabulary with which to recognise what those images have historically done.

Neither has to destroy the other.

This is why the film is more effective as a generational bridge than as a simple exercise in nostalgia. It does not merely reproduce VHS aesthetics and congratulate an older audience for recognising them. Nor does it revive the slasher simply to prosecute it according to contemporary representational standards.

It asks what can be carried forward.

Marie Claire’s discussion of the film explicitly reads Kris in relation to contemporary discourse about Gen Z sexuality, particularly repression, dissociation, information overload and the difficulty of reconciling desire with self-consciousness.

That interpretation becomes especially productive when placed beside the film’s immersion in VHS slasher culture. The generations are not presented as experiencing completely different sexual worlds. They are presented as possessing different vocabularies for negotiating many of the same contradictions.

Desire can frighten.

Vulnerability can excite.

Fantasy can contain things we would never want enacted in reality.

A cultural object can be politically troubling and personally formative.

A woman can identify with a victim without wanting victimhood.

A female or queer horror fan can identify with the killer without becoming an advocate for violence.

Fantasy permits contradiction.

Horror has always depended upon it.

The audience wants the Final Girl to escape, but it also wants the killer to find her again.

We want her to open the door and desperately want her not to open it.

We fear the monster and buy merchandise bearing the monster’s face.

We identify with the victim and return for the sequel because the killer has returned.

The female horror fan has always occupied this contradictory space. What Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma does is make the contradiction visible, sexual and intentional.

That is why the film demonstrates the female fan gaze so effectively.

Its central question is not simply:

Who is looking at the woman?

It asks something considerably more provocative:

What if the person historically positioned as the object wants to occupy every position within the horror fantasy?

They can look.

They can be looked at.

They can run.

They can chase.

They can desire the Final Girl.

They can become the Final Girl.

They can fear the killer.

They can inhabit the killer’s gaze.

And they do not have to surrender one position before claiming another.

That is the conceptual space where Mulvey and Clover become especially useful together. Mulvey gives us the political importance of asking who controls the look. Clover demonstrates that horror identification is already capable of crossing apparently stable boundaries between gender, killer and victim. Schoenbrun brings those ideas into an explicitly queer sexual fantasy in which the pleasure lies partly in crossing those boundaries deliberately.

The female fan gaze is therefore not simply a corrected male gaze.

It is mobile.

It is contradictory.

It remembers.

It repeats.

It desires.

Most importantly, it belongs to the fan.

In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the horror fan who once watched the Final Girl and the monster from outside the screen metaphorically enters the film and claims both positions. The intellectual critique of horror does not eliminate its erotic charge, and its erotic charge does not require the spectator to deny its problematic history.

That is where Schoenbrun finds common ground between generations.

Generation X’s slasher culture does not have to be thrown away.

Gen Z’s critical vocabulary does not have to be mocked.

The old horror film can instead be opened up, examined, desired and inhabited again.

The female fan does not merely reclaim the Final Girl.

She reclaims the whole damn movie.

Bibliography

British Film Institute. Blake Simons, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: Jane Schoenbrun’s Open-Hearted Slasher Is Playful About Sex and Cinema.” Sight and Sound, 19 May 2026.

Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, no. 20, 1987, pp. 187–228. DOI: 10.2307/2928507.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Festival de Cannes. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” Official Festival de Cannes film record, 2026.

Festival de Cannes. Manon Durand, “Un Certain Regard Opening Film — Who Is Jane Schoenbrun, the Filmmaker Behind Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma?” 13 May 2026.

Financial Times. “Film-maker Jane Schoenbrun: ‘The slasher is obsessed with sex’.” August 2026.

Harper’s Bazaar. “How Jane Schoenbrun Found Terror and Ecstasy at ‘Camp Miasma’.” August 2026.

Marie Claire. “Everyone Has Thoughts About Gen Z and Sex. ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Gets It Right.” August 2026.

MUBI. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Official film page, 2026.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6–18. DOI: 10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

The New Yorker. “In ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,’ Desire and Terror Meet.” August 2026.

RogerEbert.com. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Review: Slasher Fans Get the Homage They Deserve.” August 2026.

San Francisco Chronicle. “Inside Jane Schoenbrun’s Bold Slasher About Sex, Pleasure and Identity.” August 2026.

Schoenbrun, Jane, dir. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Performances by Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Fix and Jack Haven. MUBI / Plan B / Scythia Films, 2026.

Time Out. “Review: Jane Schoenbrun’s ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Is a Gift That Keeps on Giving.” 2026.

Vogue. “Gillian Anderson Romances Hannah Einbinder in This Mind-Melting Cannes Slasher.” May 2026.

WBUR. “‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Dissects Fear and Desire in Disreputable Cinema.” August 2026.

Elle. “How ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Reinvented Final Girl.” August 2026. Includes Kendra Terpenning’s discussion of constructing the Final Girl through “the female gaze for the female gaze”.