In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Gillian Anderson plays Billy, a reclusive actress famous for playing a classic “final girl”. That’s the last woman left alive to confront the killer in a slasher movie. “It’s all about flesh … and fluids,” she explains when discussing the appeal of the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, the series of slasher films at the heart of this affectionate meta-slasher.Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed queer horror film I Saw the TV Glow (2025). That film focused on the lifesaving, bittersweet pleasures of cult TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer for queer, trans and non-binary fans. For Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow represents that “egg crack” moment where trans people recognise their difference. The film’s neon-infused, dreamlike quality reminds its characters that “there is still time” for them to accept their authentic selves via graffiti scrawled throughout the world.I Saw the TV Glow’s deliberately downbeat ending is largely left aside for most of Teenage Sex and Death. But its introspective and heady yearning remains solidly in place. Here, Schoenbrun turns to the slasher genre as inspiration. The protagonist, young queer filmmaker Kris (Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder), clearly represents Schoenbrun themself and their own experiences as an emerging trans filmmaker. The trailer for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. After Kris’s first indie film, an overly intellectual slasher entitled Jouissance (psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s word for overwhelming ecstasy or transgressive pain or pleasure), she is hired to reboot the fictional 1980s slasher series Camp Miasma. Kris’ tracks down the original film’s star Billy Presley (Anderson) who, lives cloistered away Norma Desmond-style in isolation. She’s living at Camp Tivoli in the Pacific Northwest, where the original Camp Miasma was shot.Kris hopes to convince Billy to return (à la Jamie Lee Curtis in 2018’s Halloween) to the franchise for her own queer-infused reboot. Yet her fascination with the original film and its star has a shattering impact on her work. She learns that Billy’s experience on the film as a young ingenue led to her withdrawal from acting (and society) soon after its release. Evocative 1980s flashbacks reveal that Billy perhaps lost her virginity for real during a pivotal sex scene.Billy and Kris explore their desire for each other and confront their past feelings of shame around sex. However, they are not alone at the abandoned set of Camp Miasma. The ghost of Little Death (Jack Haven) stalks them in their waking and sleeping hours. Little Death is a spear-wielding supernatural terror in an HVAC suit. It wears a large square air vent as a head mask. Little Death is the horrific incarnation of trans-vengeance – a former trans camper bullied and drowned in the lake. Having lived concealed for years in a hole at the bottom of the frozen lake, Little Death emerges seasonally to murder oversexed teens.The haunting of the slasherThe film is haunted by slasher history. Little Death amalgamates Angela (Felissa Rose), the trans-teen anti-hero of Sleepaway Camp (1983), and Friday the 13th’s Jason Vorhees (1980). Jouissance is laughingly a “retelling of Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain”. But it’s also haunted by the academic legacy of gender analysis from scholars like Carol J Clover and Barbara Creed. Schoenbrun (via Kris) moves past the need to psychoanalyse horror film, shifting instead towards recent queer and trans scholarship – including my own – that highlights the pleasures of spectatorship for LGBTQ+ audiences. Trans culture itself is also haunted by a problematic past with camps. The real-life exclusion of trans women from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976-2015), led to the emergence of Camp Trans as a counter-protest-festival, as writers like Susan Stryker and Michelle Tea have documented. Schoenbrun speaking about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at Cannes. In an interview at Cannes this year, where the film won the Queer Palm, Schoenbrun stated that the film is “all about sex”. The film and its central protagonists clearly become immersed in a psychosexual frenzy of self-discovery. Just as the film endeavours to celebrate the pleasures of slasher film tropes unabashedly, Camp Miasma/Tivoli provides a space for Kris to come to terms with her own aversion to sex. She declares at one point: “I’m bad at sex, I never have been able to lose myself.” Billy retorts: “there is no bad at sex.”By experiencing Billy’s prior trauma on film, Kris realises that the practice of switching point of view shots between killer and victim provides a cathartic way to disassociate from the suggested real-life sexual assault. Billy states she went “far away” in her head to the point where she begins to “receive a signal” – a way of viewing the experience from the “killer eye” POV of Little Death, allowing for a reconfiguration of the trauma itself. With its melding of stylised painted sets and a blurring of fake and real set locations, Schoenbrun’s fondness for nostalgic hyper-reality is finely honed here. Sonically, the film’s wistful soundtrack and its visual immersion into 90s pop consumerist tropes is reminiscent of both Cronenberg’s body horrors and Araki’s work from New Queer Cinema). As with I Saw the TV Glow, the film’s conclusion shifts into the symbolic and adopts a tone of estrangement, perhaps revealing that, despite its affiliation with the genre, Teenage Sex and Death is not a slasher film per se. Rather, this is that “something else” that I and other researchers believe has come to define queer horror, as it continues to emerge as a powerful force for speaking about the horrors and pleasures of difference.Darren Elliott-Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.