The first official trailer has just dropped for Jane Schoenbrun’s upcoming slasher spin, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The film marks the latest project from the I Saw The TV Glow filmmaker, serving up a surreal new take on said subgenre.
Written and directed by Schoenbrun, Hannah Einbinder leads an extensive cast including Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Eva Victor and Sarah Sherman, in a story centred on a once-popular horror franchise that’s been run into the ground by endless bargain-bin sequels and fan fatigue. Enter an eager young filmmaker determined to drag the series back from the cinematic graveyard — only to find herself entangled with the original film’s vanished star, a reclusive actress wrapped in myth and melancholy.
According to the film’s press release, Schoenbrun has created a loving yet irreverent homage to genre staples such as Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp — with traces of the slasher forebear Psycho — while also exploring themes of desire, pleasure, and gender within horror filmmaking.
Schoenbrun has said this is the first film that “really feels like it captures the fullness” of their personality, marking a shift from We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow, both made in the immediate aftermath of coming out and concerned with dissociation, voyeurism and life outside the body. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, by contrast, is rooted in a post-transition perspective, made at a time when they began to feel more fully present within their own body and when intimacy took on a new, grounded dimension.
The filmmaker has spoken about earlier experiences of sex as deeply dissociative, shaped by dysphoria and disconnection from identity, with transition gradually easing that fracture. That trajectory feeds into the film’s core concerns, which Schoenbrun describes as working through the “oblique trauma of pre-transition life” through a story that interrogates horror, eroticism and selfhood. As with their previous films, the narrative is structured around portals — here a fictional 1980s slasher franchise, Camp Miasma — through which characters enter heightened, unstable worlds. It is, in Schoenbrun’s framing, about the act of crossing thresholds: “entering the film as a way of entering yourself.”
The ensemble also includes Amanda Fix, Arthur Conti, Zach Cherry, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Quintessa Swindell, and Kevin McDonald.
The film premiered on 13 May as the opening title of the Un Certain Regard section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it went on to win the Queer Palm. Time Out praised the film, stating that “Schoenbrun has created a brand new subgenre of cinema. Vividly emotional, and so innovative in finding playful forms to express these emotions,” while Vulture purported it “just might heal the American sexual psyche.”
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The film’s executive producers are Efe Cakarel, Jason Ropell, Zane Meyer, Daniel Bekerman, Caddy Vanasirikul and Brad Pitt, with Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner serving as producers.
Schoenbrun’s first novel, Public Access Afterworld, is set to be published by Hogarth this October 27, 2026. They are also attached to write, direct and executive produce a television adaptation of Charles Burns’ acclaimed graphic novel Black Hole for Netflix, alongside Plan B and New Regency.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will release in theaters this August 7, 2026.
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