Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma pays tribute to 1980s slasher franchises such as Friday the 13th while critiquing how horror sequels typically decline in quality and become exploitative cash-ins over time. Rather than delivering another rehashed reboot, Schoenbrun uses the genre's conventions to explore fandom, queerness and desire, arguing that horror fandom can inspire genuinely new art instead of endless recycling. This positions the film as a pointed counterpoint to the current horror boom, in which long-running franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th and Saw continue churning out sequels of diminishing quality.

The film stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a Sundance-feted director hired to reboot a fictional transphobic 1980s slasher franchise called Camp Miasma, and Gillian Anderson as Billy Paisley, the reclusive actress who played the original's "final girl" but never returned for its sequels. Seeking to understand what made the original resonate with her as a young queer viewer, Kris tracks Billy down to the remote summer camp where the film was shot, and their meeting develops into an unexpected romantic and sexual relationship. What starts as an intellectual, meta-commentary on franchise fatigue and queerness in horror gradually becomes, in the article's framing, a story about desire, shame and intimacy.