Oversexed teenagers, invincible killers and a deserted cabin – what could possibly go wrong?

Slasher movies that focus on teenagers being picked off by a killer are a horror staple. The victims were typically white and heterosexual, with villains that seemed to punish sexually active women while allowing the chaste girls to live. This survivor is often called the final girl.

Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” (2026) has earned significant critical praise for its queer and postmodern take on slasher films. Its heroine, Kris, who’s played by Hannah Einbinder, is a budding filmmaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of the slasher subgenre. It gives audiences more than one final girl and directly challenges puritanical rules about sex.

The film focuses on Kris’ decision to reboot a fictional slasher franchise, “Camp Miasma,” that has seen extremely diminishing returns with each new film. To do this, she seeks out the film’s original final girl, Billy Presley – played by Gillian Anderson – who lives on the same camp where the first film was shot. It’s quickly apparent that Kris is attracted to Billy, which changes her vision for the film she wants to make, much to the studio and her agent’s dismay. When the franchise’s villain, Little Death, begins to appear, it isn’t clear if the monster is real or fantasy.

Schoenbrun’s film riffs on 1980s slasher films like “Friday the 13th.” But it also reveals, subverts and sometimes celebrates queer tropes from past horror films, particularly queer villains.

Are lesbian vampires aging well?

For most of the history of film, queer or queer-coded characters have been frequently portrayed in a negative light.

In horror films, this negative coding was achieved by making the queer character the monster. One of the earliest of these villain narratives is the lesbian vampire trope.

In “Dracula’s Daughter”........

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