The first trailer for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has arrived following the film’s buzzy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and it looks exactly like the kind of chaotic, neon-soaked psychological horror spiral audiences have come to expect from filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun.
The surreal queer slasher stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson and currently holds a rare 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on early festival reviews.
Following the breakout success of I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun appears to be diving even deeper into themes of identity, sexuality, horror mythology, and emotional dissociation through the lens of cult slasher cinema.
The film centers on Kris, played by Einbinder, an up-and-coming filmmaker hired to reboot a dying Friday the 13th-style horror franchise called “Camp Miasma” with a more modern and socially conscious angle. Things quickly unravel when Kris visits the franchise’s original scream queen Billy Presley, played by Anderson, who now lives isolated within the same woods where the original films were shot.
What begins as creative inspiration mutates into something far stranger and bloodier. Watch below:
According to the official synopsis, the two women descend into “a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium,” with the trailer leaning hard into dream logic, queer longing, camp aesthetics, and psychedelic slasher imagery.
Schoenbrun described the film after its Cannes premiere as deeply personal.“[This movie is about] coming into one’s own body, one’s own identity, one’s own sexuality, for me, for the first time in my life at age 34,” they said. “The movie is about teenage things. The movie is about stuff that most people figure out about themselves when they’re 15 or 16, because I didn’t get a first puberty that made sense.”
They added, “I think it’s about as commercial as I can do, which is maybe not commercial.”
That tension between accessibility and experimental identity horror has increasingly become Schoenbrun’s signature. Much like I Saw the TV Glow, Camp Miasma appears less interested in straightforward scares than emotional and psychological fragmentation wrapped inside genre filmmaking.
The movie also arrives during a moment when queer horror continues gaining mainstream momentum, as audiences increasingly embrace genre films that blend body horror, sexuality, identity, nostalgia, and emotional trauma into something far more personal than traditional studio slashers.
The title alone sounds like a fake movie characters would joke about in another horror film. Somehow, that only makes it more intriguing.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma hits theaters August 7.
The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
REELated:
Marvel drops first trailer for ‘X-Men ‘97’ S2
