Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA   ***1/2

Jane Schoenbrun

2026

IDEA:  Tasked with rebooting the once-popular "Camp Miasma" horror franchise, a queer filmmaker visits the reclusive former actress who played the final girl in the original film.

“Meaning, and where it is made, does not have a discrete origin in either spectators’ bodies or cinematic representation but emerges in their conjunction.” — Vivian Sobchack

“An unraveling or breaking of the boundaries of the spectator is the fundamental condition of cinematic pleasure.” — Steven Shaviro

“We are not the same viewer before, during or after the horror film event.” — Anna Powell

BLURB:  Do we make movies or do movies make us? A version of this question is posed by Hannah Einbinder’s Kris in a moment of apparent delirium, but any true cinephile knows the answer is an emphatic “Yes.” Engaging deeply with psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories of film spectatorship, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a profound expression of how cinema shapes subjectivity, and how we encounter ourselves through that process. Kris already has some understanding of this when she goes to visit Billy Presley (a breathtakingly seductive, eccentric Gillian Anderson), the actress who helped awaken her to her sexuality as a girl watching “Camp Miasma.” A schlocky, outdated slasher for most, “Camp Miasma” is a primal scene for Kris, and it’s only gradually she learns how intimately she wants to return to it, not to analyze and remake it as an academic but to surrender herself completely to the carnal desires and sensations it activated within her. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma charts this shift of consciousness as both a queer trans-coded narrative and a metaphor for how and why we watch movies. We seek the thrill, especially but not exclusively in horror films, of vicariously transgressing our physical limits, of being voyeur and object, of letting our bodies be captured by images and sounds that reorient our perception. When the cinephilia is particularly intense, as it is for Kris, the desire approaches a death drive: to be devoured by the thing you love. In stark contrast to Jane Schoenbrun’s first two features, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma turns not on a dysphoric frustration with the body in relation to media but with its liberation, via the consummation of an impossible cinematic fantasy of immersion. Reflecting the Kris-Billy dyad, the film potently blends the cerebral and the sensual, irreverent pastiche and emotionally sincere manifesto, speaking the language of High Art while validating the Low. Its final accomplishment might be that it provokes the same intoxicating passion for movies that so palpably powered its own creation. 

Blue Film

BLUE FILM   ***

Elliot Tuttle

2025

IDEA:  When a camboy is invited to an in-person meeting with an elder fan, he discovers a disturbing past connection with the man.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Nominally, Blue Film is an attention-grabbing provocation: a taboo subject under a euphemistic sign. The film appears to be delivering on its title in the first few minutes, a webcam video of Kieron Moore’s “Aaron Eagle” strutting his stuff for an unseen online clientele, before our expectations are subverted in short order. This is just about the maximum amount of skin bared in the whole movie; the rest will be preoccupied with philosophical conversation in a manner far more akin to My Dinner with André than any porno. Instead of recreating an aesthetics of exploitation — which he only rarely hints at through some questionable format changes to digital video — Tuttle uses a charged scenario to rigorously explore morality, loneliness, power, aging, regret, and the potential for atonement. What is transgressive here stems simply from the premise, the mere suggestion that a pedophile is a human being with complex issues seriously worth looking at rather than some elusive cosmic evil to dismiss. Blue Film challenges the limits of our empathy by presenting a (former) pedophile, Hank, who is erudite, caring, and repentant. Reed Birney weaponizes a tender, avuncular sagacity to make this figure at once unnerving and exceptionally rational, so self-aware and morally alert he can eloquently unpack his psychology without denying his heinous actions. Moore is a terrifically receptive screen partner, his braggadocio slipping before our eyes to reveal another kind of wounded, lonely man who wants nothing more than to be wanted, regardless of who it is wanting him. His own hostile tendencies show how desire, and insecurity, can become warped into abhorrent impulse. Besides some scenes bathed in the titular color, Tuttle keeps his visual palette spare, and chaste; the body parts he’s most drawn to are faces, through which he excavates a whirlwind of emotions over a night neither Aaron nor Hank will be able to forget.

Barrio Triste

BARRIO TRISTE   ***

Stillz

2025

IDEA:  Four poor adolescent boys in Medellín, Colombia run off with a news reporter's camera and spontaneously document their adventures.

BLURB:  Barrio Triste is effectively (and affectively) designed like a rediscovered diary transmission from the past, sent by a group of downtrodden teenagers as visual proof of their existence against a society that renders them lost, invisible. Call it Los Olvidados. The film’s low-resolution video format and first-person perspective revive the once-ubiquitous found-footage subgenre, giving agency to characters who, in the opening minutes, co-opt Stillz’s camera (a TV news camera in the diegesis) to record their lives. Stillz takes full advantage of the aesthetic possibilities of this setup by executing long, winding tracking shots through the streets and along the rooftops of the barrio, mapping a lived geography thick with environmental and sensory texture. What is captured is not just squalor, but play, generosity, and beauty; little girls biking, the protagonist feeding a carrot to a horse, a rainbow peeking faintly through fog above the city. Neorealist observation gradually morphs into mystical intervention as the boys trudge on and night descends. Now, we’re in Dante’s Inferno, complete with a burning car, labyrinthine ruins, and a silhouetted satyr. Even in such baleful moments, Barrio Triste rarely loses a sense of ambient wonder, conjured as much through the woozy, smeary video image as Arca’s score, a malleable blend of electronic dissonance and plaintive piano. All the while, dead pixels seem to multiply on the screen, appearing like stars in the darkness. Maybe they are like the teenagers of Barrio Triste, turning visual absence into presence.