Schoenbrun's Camp Miasma Satirizes Pop Culture's Hold
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- Jane Schoenbrun directs "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma," their third feature, following "We're All Going to the World's Fair" (on online creepypasta rabbit holes) and "I Saw the TV Glow" (on cult-TV obsession).
- Hannah Einbinder stars as Kris, a queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting a fictional 1980s slasher franchise called Camp Miasma while balancing an indie-Sundance sensibility with the franchise's gore-and-nudity fan base.
- Gillian Anderson plays Billy Presley, a reclusive actor from the original Camp Miasma who now lives at the abandoned campground running a peculiar form of exposure therapy, and pushes back against Kris's academic approach with the reminder that the franchise's appeal was "flesh and fluids."
- The in-film franchise spoofs Friday the 13th-style sequels that "traveled to Manhattan, then space, and so on," with a masked monster named Little Death who eventually emerges from the real on-site lake as past and present bleed together.
- Schoenbrun renders the camp with matte-painted backgrounds and mixes fuzzy VHS-style synth scores with contemporary CGI blood to blur fiction and reality, culminating in an "inscrutable final act" that argues viewers should embrace how pop culture makes them feel rather than endlessly meta-analyze it.
- The film jabs at Hollywood's "rampant intellectualization—and corporatization—of the cinematic junk food of decades past," with Kris noting "DESIRE" in her notepad during a cheesy sex scene as a wry nod to critical overthinking.
Why it matters: Schoenbrun, whose "I Saw the TV Glow" became a cult favorite and A24 release, cements a recurring thesis across three films — that immersive pop culture is intrinsic to modern identity formation — now paired with Einbinder (a breakout from HBO's Hacks) and Anderson as a commercial-signaling move. The genre-spoofing, lowbrow-canonizing approach positions Schoenbrun as an indie voice with growing mainstream reach.
