Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026): Jane Schoenbrun's Cannes-Winning Queer Meta-Slasher, Explained

No. There is no real "Camp Miasma" film series; Jane Schoenbrun built the entire fictional franchise for this movie, mythology and all. In the story, Camp Miasma was a 1980s smash that spawned endless sequels, merch, and a cult around its killer "Little Death" — a gender-fluid teenager bullied to death by fellow campers who comes back as the saga's masked slasher. The backstory tells you Schoenbrun is using the slasher to talk about exactly what their films always talk about: queerness, cruelty, and the monsters born from nurture, not nature.

The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), an up-and-coming director who uses Sundance buzz to reboot Camp Miasma and becomes hyper fixated on casting Billy (Gillian Anderson), the mostly-forgotten actress who was the original's final girl.

If you know Schoenbrun from I Saw the TV Glow or We're All Going to the World's Fair, you know they don't make conventional horror. Their films have recurring themes; the internet and old TV shows, and how the screens we grow up staring into can potentially mold us. The delivery mechanism is horror to get at the pains of becoming yourself. Camp Miasma is their biggest swing yet, and their most conventional horror movie, a slasher homage with real kills. However, Cannes reviews suggest it's still unmistakably Schoenbrun: psychedelic, psychosexual, more focused on the two female leads at its center than on a pile of bodies.

That it opened Un Certain Regard and won the Queer Palm with a nine-minute ovation and a 100% early Rotten Tomatoes score says that the crowd resonated with the showing, and is a good indicator of things to come.

The film lives or dies on its central pair. Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) plays Kris, the fan-turned-director; Gillian Anderson plays Billy, the recluse she's desperately trying to thrust back in front of a camera. As the two work together, the reboot transforms into "a frenzy of psychosexual mania," desire, fear, and delirium that inevitably bleeds into the production. The supporting cast is stacked with talent: Jasmin Savoy Brown, Eva Victor, Sarah Sherman, Zach Cherry, and Dylan Baker.

Here's the catch with a Schoenbrun film: the people who love it really love it, and the people who don't usually have difficulty in understanding the film. A nine-minute Cannes ovation and a 100% critics' score say one thing. But how you felt about World's Fair and TV Glow can be a powerful indicator as well.

So before August 7, call it. How scary is a Schoenbrun slasher, really? Or is the horror all atmosphere and angst? Where does it land overall? Lock in your prediction below, and we'll score it against the real numbers once the film is out.