Blunt Head Joy: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

Have you ever crossed paths with someone that clicks into your brain to the point that you can't help but recognize this fated connection and begin to spill your guts no matter the mess and perils that are guaranteed to come with it? Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an exploration of what happens when you become soft and open up about what makes you tick regardless of the ugliness that geysers up with it yet with a little hope that someone will recognize and appreciate these things about you or else you will go down running and screaming with it.

Kris is a young and upcoming queer filmmaker who has been given the keys to reboot the problematic slasher franchise Camp Miasma but they are in a creative jam and the pressure from studio executives and their money grubbing agent isn't helping so Kris reaches out to Billy the aging starlet of the first Camp Miasma film who mysteriously disappeared after that film. Kris arrives at Billy's home which turns out to be the original camp location for the Camp Miasma films where they both meet on shaky ground having their doubts of each other but slowly they open up over KFC, a rainbow assortment of gummy candies, and a seemingly never ending supply of joints. Caught up in Billy's winter wonderland Kris can't help but get snared in Billy's mysterious charm and frank approach to Kris personal life problems but as these moments unravel something is stirring at the bottom of the camp's lake waiting for its opportunity to emerge and set things right with these trespassers.

I will be honest that director Jane Schoenbrun's films don't exactly click with me, mostly due to the stylistic choices of media saturated internet culture that oozes from their films and the pulsating metaphors more obvious and large than a zit on the tip of your nose at the brink of rupturing but with that said this film is my favorite of their "spiritual trilogy". To call this film a slasher is really a reach that not even a giant spear could brush against, instead we get a hangout therapy session that reads more of a the slashers guide to sexuality.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) character reveals that she/their sexual frustrations in their life is not only coming from their work schedule but also an infuriating complicated poly relationship and a buried desire that is directly linked to her sexual awakening experience from a viewing of the first Camp Miasma film, Billy (Gillian Anderson) comes in like a recluse mountain monk from a kung fu film ready to share all her sage advice on how to tap into these desires instead of picking them apart and trying to academically explain them away. This theme of something foul in the air is really made obvious in the title with the word miasma; the miasma belief was that someone has become sick from bad air that has risen from some decaying putrid matter that is hidden away. Schoenbrun won't leave the obvious at that though as we are introduced the serial ventilation masked slasher, Little Death, which is a nod to the French phrase la petite mort that is referencing that orgasms are little deaths that reset a person in a brief moment of ethereal bliss of release, and speaking of release a ceiling vent mask seems to be once again play on words with Little Death being a literal vent to release one's worries.

Schoenbrun knows their slasher film trivia as it is sprinkled all over this film and since Schoenbrun knows their slashers it is easy to make the assumption that they know of Carol Clover's book Men, Women, and Chainsaws where Clover lays out a psychoanalytical theory that investigates the sexual nature of slasher films and the murder tool becoming a phallic instrument to act out the killer's desires that will eventually be castrated by the final girl and turned against the killer reversing the gender roles and literal penetration of the characters. Its pretty clear once we learn Kris desire to be chased and become powerless at a killer's hand and finally achieving a new kind of penetration that will completely shake up their world.

This is the construct of the film that works in the end, Schoenbrun is tackling a topic of sexuality and fantasy that is complicated due to the politics of desire and all the academic sub politics of patriarchy and gender forces people to question and attack their own desires to the point that they become a frozen sexually frustrated knot that can't function at points in their life because they won't cross this abyss. Thats where Billy comes in and pretty much teaches Kris that life is nothing but flesh and fluids and that Kris needs to secede to her desires and go with the flow because the rebirth after the little death will be worth whatever is lost on the path there for those things themselves could be part of the jam in the very thing that makes you happy. Which is interesting when we compare this idea with the excess amount of candy that Billy and Kris engorge themselves on throughout the film, the candy becomes this capitalistic excess of pleasure that is okay because its surface level consumption that is not directly affecting "woke" politics while carnal sexual desires on the other hand feeds a beast of scorn and inappropriateness that can't be forgiven.

Finally Schoenbrun gives us something they have withheld from their previous films— a happy ending. There is an expectation of queer films at this time to address the horrors and traumas in our lives where the characters must suffer so that we can relate and have empathy with these martyrs, this film on the other hand says forget about all that noise, live a little and love a lot which will explode into an unparalleled queer joy. When Kris arrives at the camp we are thrown into this frozen cold world that is caught in a blizzard but as Kris starts to embrace who they are Little Death begins to thaw the iced over lake kicking in a surreal world that slashes through all the hurt and troubles of the world. The surrealist approach of the film with blood geysers, painted backdrops, fleshy walls holding secrets of a metaverse spilling into Kris reality making her part of the film that she is creating. This surreal fantasy world makes one believe that the eventual killings and blood soaked shopping trip at the end themselves are just images of fantasy and not the actual but still a very important part of the real that Kris must overcome to take back control of her life.

While I still have my hang-ups with Schoenbrun's approach to filmmaking with the heavy handed metaphors and pop media references which really makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma more of a project made from a college film students academic dissertation paper on a slasher film with easy hand holding how to interpret this instead of an actual slasher film that we the viewers must wrestle the themes from releasing us from any of the work as an observer, I still have to admit I'm overall happy that Schoenbrun is taking on sexuality in film when we are in a frozen wasteland of puritanistic complaining about sex in film and while the approach is not a sharp tipped spear that we wish for but instead a blunt beating over the head— it still gets the job done.

★★★½