Jane Schoenbrun’s Love Letter to Teen Horror

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is gently eerie and filled with longing.

“It’s not like years ago,” croons Michael Stipe on R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” the spare, piano-driven ballad that brings the band’s 1992 album, Automatic for the People, to a melancholy crescendo. The song’s crystalline reminiscence of teenage horseplay is uncommonly personal and precise, like Proust by way of Don McLean. “They cannot see me naked,” the narrator sighs coyly, treading water between innocence and experience.

A stripped-down arrangement of “Nightswimming” opens director Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It’s the ideal overture for a self-reflexive horror comedy, in which a secluded lake doubles as a hunting ground; no less than skinny-dipping, serial murder “deserves a quiet night.” “Nightswimming” signals Schoenbrun’s Gen X sensibilities as surely as the allusions to Michael Stipe in their previous, ’90s-set feature I Saw the TV Glow (2024). That film was beguiling and frightening in ways that had nothing to do with jump scares or jolts; its obliquely rendered story of outsiders drawn toward—and then trapped inside—a supernaturally themed television series pulsated with analog-era nostalgia.

Schoenbrun’s characters are defined by a longing for communion, usually via obsessive fixations on pop-cultural ephemera, like the online urban legend Schoenbrun chronicled in their unsettling documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018). Their 2021 horror film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, foregrounded a teenage girl vlogging into the void, searching for kindred spirits; it threaded extremely online anxieties through a meditation on dissociation and dysphoria. The critic Richard Brody called Schoenbrun a “poet of solitude” in his review of I Saw the TV Glow, a film Schoenbrun began in the midst of their gender transition. “I was attempting to make sense,” Schoenbrun has written, “of the vast and sudden chasm that had opened underneath my feet in the aftermath of my egg crack,” the moment when a trans person breaks through their shell and realizes their gender identity. “The freefall of utter precarity.” The picture’s haunting signature image was a suburban sidewalk with a message scrawled in chalk: THERE IS STILL TIME.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie of fissures opening up over a molten core of allegory. Its heroine, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is an up-and-coming independent filmmaker, given to spelunking in sunken places in search of inspiration; while developing ideas for the next installment of a long-dormant horror franchise, she returns to the primal scene where the original film was shot, only to discover that the campground is haunted, by both the spirits of slasher movies........

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