Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a 2026 queer horror-comedy written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. The film follows Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer filmmaker hired to reboot the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise. To develop the new film, Kris tracks down Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the original movie’s final girl and has since withdrawn from public life. When the two women reconnect at the abandoned camp where the original was filmed, their professional relationship turns into something much more intimate.
MUBI’s official film page describes the movie as “LGBTQ+, Comedy, Horror” and centers the blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium that Kris and Billy enter together. The film premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Queer Palm, before its U.S. theatrical release.
At the center of Camp Miasma is a fictional 1980s slasher franchise with the same name, whose original mythology is deeply transphobic. Its killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), was originally a gender-nonconforming child who was bullied and killed by other campers before returning from the lake as a supernatural murderer. Kris immediately recognizes the problems with this backstory and is hired specifically to make the franchise more palatable to a contemporary audience. Kris grew up obsessed with Camp Miasma, even though the franchise’s treatment of gender and difference was explicitly hostile. Her relationship with the movies becomes a way of exploring how queer people can find themselves in media that was never created with them in mind.
Schoenbrun has discussed their own history with horror films that treated gender-nonconforming characters as monsters, including Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and Sleepaway Camp. The Independent’s interview with Schoenbrun, Einbinder, and Anderson explores how that history influenced the film and its interest in queer liberation. In the same interview, Hannah Einbinder said that Kris’ emotional journey from discomfort to shame to liberation mirrored her own experience and that she “related to it enormously.” The Conversation’s analysis of the film as a queer slasher about trauma and desire also examines how Camp Miasma moves beyond the traditional idea of the horror monster as simply something to fear.
Bisexuality is also a fundamental part of the film. Kris is explicitly queer and is in a polyamorous relationship with Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown). Mari is bi and also has a relationship with Thor (Aren Buchholz), who is explicitly described as a bi man. At the same time, neither Kris nor Billy is given a specific bi label. Kris and Billy’s attractions are presented without being tied to a specific gender. Their relationship develops from a shared fascination with sex, fantasy, and the original Camp Miasma, eventually becoming romantic and sexual.
This distinction between explicit bi representation and queer characters whose experiences can fall under the bi umbrella is important to understand the movie’s bi representation. Camp Miasma is interested in desire as something that does not always arrive with a neat explanation. Kris spends much of the movie overthinking sex and trying to understand what her desires mean, while Billy encourages her to experience them instead of analyzing them from a distance.
The film also embraces the possibility that queer identity does not always need to be reduced to one specific label. Mari and Thor provide explicit bi representation, while Kris and Billy occupy a more open-ended queer space. Even if they don’t use the label, their attractions fall under the bi umbrella, which reflects the film’s larger interest in allowing desire to exist without always requiring a definition.
That approach has resonated with bi audiences, too. The podcast This Feels Bi dedicated an episode to the film titled “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Feels Bi,” highlighting its bisexual cast, sapphic relationship, exploration of fantasy and desire, and use of Little Death as a symbol.
Ultimately, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a story about queer desire, sexual liberation, fantasy, trauma, and the complicated ways people use movies to understand themselves. The result is a film where bisexuality is both something that can be named and something that can exist without being named. For a movie so interested in the idea that desire does not always follow the rules we create for it, that distinction is part of what makes its queer representation particularly interesting.