"CAMP MIASMA" is one of the best movies of 2026

“Flesh and fluids.”

Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma—shortened here to Camp Miasma—has slowly expanded into theaters nationwide following a limited, critically praised rollout. It has earned near-universal acclaim in the process, and for good reason: Above all else, Camp Miasma tells a distinctly powerful story about art, passion and the freedom found in surrendering ourselves to both.

The film follows queer indie director Kris Williams (Hacks star Hannah Einbinder), who has been tasked with resurrecting the long-dormant, in-universe slasher franchise “Camp Miasma,” à la recent real-world revivals such as 2018’s Halloween.

An obsessive fan of the original franchise, Kris makes it her mission to recruit that film’s final girl, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a reclusive former star who stepped away from Hollywood following the release of the original Camp Miasma. The eccentric Billy now lives in the Pacific Northwest at the abandoned summer camp where the movie was filmed.

Kris arrives star-struck and armed with lofty ideas about how to make the reboot work. She frames her vision as an “elevated” reinterpretation and origin story for the franchise’s slasher icon, Little Death—a “trans monster” who blends Jason Voorhees’ tragic backstory with the trans-coded Angela Baker from 1983’s Sleepaway Camp.

Kris’ agent reminds her over the phone that the studio wants a “woke” modernization designed to cater to contemporary trends. Billy, however, immediately sees through Kris’ buzzword-filled pitch.

The original Camp Miasma was not about gender studies or complex ruminations on trans and queer identity, Billy explains. It was about “flesh and fluids”—sex and death. It was about horny teenage counselors being hunted down and slaughtered, just like any other old-school slasher.

Kris is somewhat flabbergasted. She has spent her life dissecting Camp Miasma as though it were a cinematic thesis, perhaps as a way of validating both her enjoyment of the film and her own identity.

As the story continues and begins teetering into the surreal, Billy shows Kris her original negative of the Camp Miasma print. Kris’ obsession with the franchise—and with Billy herself—stems from one crucial scene in which Billy’s character engages in lackluster sex with a sleazy older man at the camp.

During the encounter, Little Death—aptly named after the French term for orgasm—creeps into the room after dispatching the remaining counselors in a gloriously over-the-top sequence set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December.” As Billy’s character sees Little Death approaching, she experiences her first genuine orgasm. The resulting “look” on the young Billy’s face became iconic and seared itself into Kris’ mind at an impressionable age.

Kris later tells Billy that she is not a “sexual” person. She cannot get outside her own head long enough to climax; she cannot surrender herself to the experience. She overthinks sex, breaking it down into allegory and intellectual theory in much the same way she has always dissected Camp Miasma.

Over the course of the film, Billy teaches Kris how to let go. Not everything we enjoy must be justified through academia, analysis or theory. For all Kris’ liberal ideals and enlightened understanding of gender politics and film, she has forgotten—or suppressed—the most basic and fundamental element of both life and art: pleasure.

Kris confesses that, despite herself, she is aroused by the idea of becoming the final girl: breasts bouncing, body covered in blood, skimpy outfit clinging to her as she fully claims her femininity and power in defiance. She imagines herself being simultaneously objectified and canonized.

This idea of escaping our own minds feels like a metamorphic turning point in Schoenbrun’s work.

Their debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, told the grim story of a reclusive girl who lives chronically online. Schoenbrun’s follow-up, the similarly bleak I Saw the TV Glow, explored how the comfort of the media we consume during adolescence can become a cage, shackling us to the past and preventing us from moving into the future.

Camp Miasma suggests there is another way to love and honor the media that made us: not by allowing it to consume us, but by allowing it to transform us. We can live with it and even live through it while still remembering to live for ourselves.

By the film’s climax—both literally and figuratively—Kris has been transformed. She has become the woman she once believed she could inhabit only within her own imagination and through the movies she worshipped. She emerges first into a Technicolor, surrealist daze and then, finally, into the “real” world, changed by experience rather than confined by voyeuristic obsession and adherence to intellectual theory.

Camp Miasma asks us to embrace the “flesh and fluids” of life—of everything. It asks us to stop existing as side characters and passive observers and instead become vessels for what we love. We should not merely idolize or obsess over our heroes and heroines. We should allow them to transform us.

Our childhood heroes can—and perhaps should—become part of who we are.