Critics reviews

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma celebrates the slashers and, through that, explores the complicated feelings of loving a genre that doesn't reliably love you back... [It's] a comedy that is part horny psychosexual thriller and part campy parody. The result is a film that is rollicking in queer joy, blood spray, and irreverent humor.

Jaunty, knowing... [Camp Miasma] is more about sex therapy and film-studies fun than horror.

There is lots of deadpan humour and even more film studies. At times, especially in the busy third act, the film veers close to pseudo-scholarly sermonising... But [it] is grounded by the moving central relationship, one that’s made tender and credible by winning turns from Anderson and Einbinder.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a great ride – it’s fast, funny and knowing as well as scary... [an] unmissable, innovative horror film... Not just zingily scripted, it’s also exhilaratingly inventive and visually allusive.

There’s a new confidence, playfulness and humour here. Compared with the muted, melancholic tone of I Saw the TV Glow, Camp Miasma, for all its carnage, feels defiant, almost celebratory.

Heady, funny, unnerving... [Camp Miasma] feels exactly like the contents of personal headspace projected onscreen — an ultra-auteurist vision of hang-ups, inspirations, blood and candy.

Schoenbrun is a madly ambitious talent, deconstructing the nature of genre one moment and channeling an uneasy Lynchian mood the next... It's the highest compliment I can pay Einbinder and Anderson that somewhere out there, their performances are already captivating a new generation of pop-culture obsessives.

[Camp Miasma] devolves into a psychosexual, melodramatic romp, a metacommentary on filmmaking, sex, and death... Devotees of TV Glow may find the narrative too linear and the gags too saccharine, but this surprisingly hopeful ode to campy horror and movie snacks offers up a lot to love.

Vertiginous [and] shape-shifting... What's new [about Camp Miasma]--and wondrously entertaining--is how much fun Schoenbrun is having. Desire, in their prior work, was interrogated as a dark, thorny, destabilizing force; it remains a volatile drive, but one whose complications and consummations sizzle with pleasure, horniness, and a willingness to be extremely silly.

[The film] is, [for Schoenbrun,] a significant leap forward artistically. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is a bold, bloody good and confessional statement that touches on the sometimes unhealthy relationship between art and artist.

Schoenbrun is a trans filmmaker, and you can feel how personal the notion of reconnection, identification, and liberation is for them in telling this tale. Yet the way they’ve artistically leveled up and used the moody aesthetic of the earlier works to craft a funny, unsettling, and ultimately emancipating work is exhilarating on all levels.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be comfort food to viewers who pride themselves on their acquired tastes. It’s a heady, deliciously visceral celebration of the toxic nourishment we derive from mass-produced multiplex junk; it indulges the queasy ecstasy we derive from consuming things that we suspect are good and bad for us in the same bite.