“I Like That Feeling”: Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

We never fucked, but we watched scary movies together, which was kind of the same thing. In his bedroom with the door closed, teenagers were mauled and decapitated again and again— their blood oozing across a forest floor, a dirt-smeared cabin. Nearly teenagers ourselves, we didn’t even hold hands as we stared at his fuzzy TV. At jump scares or especially gnarly kills, though, my body would press against his, an electric shock pulsing between us. That’s what the movies were about: the permeability of the flesh; the feeling, and erotics, of being subsumed.

Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has some familiarity with being subsumed. Their third narrative film is many things: a love letter to 1980s slasher cinema, an exploration of a queer woman’s sexual awakening, a critique of the transphobia present in both the Hollywood studio system and the movies it produced. But more than that, it captures—better than anything I’ve seen before—the particular intimacy of watching a scary movie with someone you’re falling for. It’s a movie about watching and being watched, about what happens when you turn the movie off and are seen as yourself for the first time.

“The slasher evinces a fascination with flesh or meat itself as that which is hidden from view,” Carol J. Clover writes in her landmark 1992 study of horror films, gender, and sexuality, Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Slasher movies are where throughlines of sex and violence, desire and harm, come together and become visible. Series like Friday the 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the notoriously transphobic Sleepaway Camp (each referenced in Schoenbrun’s film)—they all spell out a language of desire in blood. And through the thrills these movies provide, we can, I believe, understand our own desires too. “There are certain nights you get this feeling, really late and really quiet, when all of a sudden you just know that some psycho-killer-escaped-mental-patient is going to break in and chop you up into a million little pieces,” says Gillian Anderson’s Billy midway through the film. “Oh, I like that feeling.”

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma begins with a handheld shot of a film set, menacingly styled as if it were from a killer’s point-of view. Already, the line between viewing and slashing is blurred. From there, we are introduced to Hannah Einbinder’s Kris, a young queer director coming off an avant-garde horror film. (“Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain,” as Billy scoffs to her.) She has been assigned to take the reins on the “blatantly transphobic” Camp Miasma, a slasher franchise in which Little Death, a gender-nonconforming killer wearing an HVAC system on his head, slices and dices an endless procession of horned-up teens. In scenes from the original Camp Miasma, we see Little Death’s transphobic origin story play out in full, gender-panicked detail. For those viewers who are more like Little Death than not, this spectacle of horror can hurt. 

But if you’re hurt by something, it doesn’t mean you can’t reclaim that pain. A decade of Camp Miasma movies, video games, and knockoffs has run the franchise into the ground, and Kris has been brought in by the C-suite to revive it. She is, for the moment, their chosen token. But she has her own ideas: “The original Camp Miasma was my queer awakening. I’m going to beat Hollywood at its own game.” Using this opportunity to find Billy, the final girl from the original film, Kris discovers her living on the grounds of the summer camp where Camp Miasma was shot—the film’s first surrealist flourish. Though Kris risks losing her proposed movie here, she finds something far more important: a life beyond the work, a life in her body at last.

“Camp Miasma was about two very simple things,” Billy tells Kris over a joint the night she arrives, the snow piled around the porch like a benediction. “Flesh and fluids.” Schoenbrun’s film is striking in the way it embraces those two elements in equal measure, presenting women’s desires without shame. That evening, with a tenderness that’s both disarming and beautiful, Kris and Billy watch each other watching Miasma with the aid of a dusty projector, enact a proxy sex scene involving fried chicken and dipping sauce, and relish the blurry intoxication of smoking weed on a winter’s night. These unexpected intimacies are most palpable in a bravura one-shot sequence, set improbably to Counting Crows’ “A Long December.” Little Death, played by Jack Haven, impales dozens of partying teenagers and then, splattered with blood, stops to breathe. As his eyes flutter open to meet the camera’s gaze, the film feels as though it is breaking open, pierced by his stare. Little Death then runs his hand against his air vent, smearing it with more blood, and begins to kill again. The scene is campy and sad and hot all at the same time. Yes, I thought, picturing the thrill I’ve experienced watching someone I care for as they watch, my eyes meeting theirs as unspeakable horrors play out on a screen. Yes, I thought, remembering the first movies I had seen that made me feel like this too.

As Little Death continued to move through a scrim of gore—dancing, almost—I felt the chill that runs up a body upon being perceived. (Another scene in which Kris peers breathlessly into Billy’s bedroom through slats in the wall, Psycho-style, underscores this connection between looking and feeling.) I myself have leaned into the shock of violence in slasher movies, absorbing film after film about losing what is most dear to you (your life) and finding something different on the other side. But Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma also asks a question I have asked during my tenure of watching fucked-up films; the reason, really, I started watching them in the first place. Wouldn’t you want to be hurt, at least a little bit? And is there a world you can build where that can feel good, too?

*

 

Okay. On pain.

We became close because we were both outcasts, but we didn’t talk about our otherness to each other once. I was an outwardly queer kid and inwardly closeted trans woman, assaulted and socially ostracized from a young age, afraid of practically everything. I hungered to turn off my endlessly fretting brain and overshot nervous system, wanting one single space to practice bravery that wouldn’t damage me further. I started watching horror movies because they gave me that space, made my desires feel graspable. With the catharsis of a knife plunging into flesh, the risky vulnerability that simulated bloodshed can evoke, these films brought us to our bodies: a zone of potential where no outcomes are foreclosed. They gave me a way to make my fears feel loved—and, in the process, gave me date fodder too.

“If it gets too real, you can always turn it off,” Billy tells Kris, quoting the tagline of the home-video release of the original Camp Miasma. I believe, as Schoenbrun’s movie does, that through the cycle of abandon and release that propels horror, that through turning it on and turning it off, we can understand what courses through our bodies and what we want from them in turn. That was what I was looking for with my friend in the violence playing out on the screen in front of us: a place where we could be in control of our hurt. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma knows that, in the face of insistent cruelty, sometimes you can find a cruelty of your own to make a home. It understands that, whatever happened to you, you still deserve intimacy in all its complexity and depth.

To quote a song that rings through the back half of the film: “Pain is the heart of love” and pain is also “the heart of pain.” It’s all the same, and it loops elliptically through the film. Kris’s fears—her subsumption into the machinations of Hollywood, her sexual dysfunction (always eclipsed by her work), the threat of crossing a horizon from which she cannot return—all of these animate and complicate her desire. Billy, meanwhile, is marred by loneliness, living alone at the summer camp that haunts her. “The first movie really left its mark on me, and I needed to get away from reality,” she says. And then later, talking about her first foray into sex: “I was losing my virginity, and it was exactly as bad as I had always imagined it to be.” 

Still, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is fundamentally hopeful. Sure, it’s about the vice-grip of dissociation, about how it feels to sleepwalk through life and sex inured to pleasure. But it also touches on a cure for that. Despite making a movie about anhedonia, Schoenbrun finds erotic potential in so many shared moments, even in moments that aren’t explicitly sexual: Billy’s red lipstick, her sideways laugh, that fried chicken again. And, of course, they find erotic potential in the sex as well. Flesh and fluids, the movie argues. They’re everywhere.

Shortly after we started watching franchised derivatives together, me and the boy who did not become my lover, I rented the original Friday the 13th from the local video store. I wanted to build my own understanding of a language that he spoke and I didn’t, not yet. As the VHS tape slid into the player, I thought of what I’d tell him about the movie: how much I’d scream, the deaths that would stick with me, the thrills I’d learn to seek. Without realizing it, I was also opening the door in that moment to other connections that would form in the years to come: to hands intertwining across movie-theater armrests and beneath the blinking gaze of a laptop screen; to the sticky fragrance of popcorn mixing with the scent of a loved one’s skin, so close to my own. Watching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I thought of my early experiences of desire in his bedroom: his peeling Turistas poster on the wall, the crispness of the bedsheets, and the smell of his body spray stinging my nostrils, as well as the glistening, frightening future he exposed me to. I suspect Schoenbrun’s film, in all its arterial gore and care, will open a door for people, too. Sometimes the only thing to do after circling the origin of all your fears is to jump in. Talking about how they can really only get off on horror films, Billy eases Kris’s body beneath hers, and says, “Let's do it. Let's make a movie.”

Zefyr Lisowski is the author of Uncanny Valley Girls, an essay collection about horror movies, exes, and intimacy. The recipient of a 2025 Lambda Literary Award, she is also the author of two poetry collections. She lives in Brooklyn and online at zefyrlisowski.com.