Slasher movies are about teenage sex and death, almost always in that order. It is a simple formula, but one that has proven remarkably durable: put a group of attractive young people somewhere they shouldn't be, give them enough privacy to make increasingly poor decisions, and wait for the killer to arrive. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma understands this formula intimately, but its real subject is the strange relationship between horror movies and the people who make, watch, commodify, and overanalyze them.

The film begins with the mythology of Camp Miasma, a fictional slasher franchise that has somehow become a cultural institution. Its history follows the familiar trajectory of many real horror series. The original becomes an immense box-office success, religious groups protest its content, and increasingly watered-down sequels pile on convoluted lore until the once-simple premise becomes almost incomprehensible. Razzies fly in left and right, with only the weird diehard fans left to even notice when a new film comes out. Eventually, nostalgia takes over. Feature articles dissect the franchise's hidden meanings, conspiracy theories emerge around its mythology, and Hollywood decides it is time for a reboot, one that promises to be more "elevated."

Naturally, the studio sees this as an opportunity to make money. Queerness and political correctness become marketing language, themes to be packaged and propagated across merchandise and streaming rights rather than artistic ideas worth exploring. Into this corporate machine steps a wunderkind fresh out of Sundance, who actually wants to use queerness as part of the film's art. The studio, unsurprisingly, isn't nearly as interested in that version of the movie.

At the center of this production is Kris (Hannah Einbinder from Hacks), a timid young woman who appears to have spent most of her life on the outside looking in. She is starstruck by Gillian Anderson (honestly, who wouldn't be?) as Billy Presley, the original film’s final girl, but her fascination with the actress reveals something deeper about her own isolation. Kris keeps her arms tucked inside her sleeves, only pulling them out to fix her glasses as she stutters through her words. Love and sex seem almost completely foreign to her, something she desperately wants but has no idea how to approach. She becomes an obvious stand-in for writer-director Jane Schoenbrun's own relationship with those feelings, giving the film's awkwardness a distinctly personal quality.

Schoenbrun has explored queerness and gender identity throughout their previous films. We're All Going to the World's Fair used online horror culture to explore teenage alienation and the search for identity, while I Saw the TV Glow more directly connected its supernatural imagery to the repression and realization of a transgender identity. In both, horror becomes a language for feelings that their characters struggle to articulate. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma continues that exploration while turning its gaze toward the industry itself, questioning what happens when something deeply personal becomes another marketable commodity.

Presley, meanwhile, is the director of the relationship, giving orders to the timid Kris and assuming control over their interactions. Her philosophy toward horror is similarly reductive. People, she argues, take these movies too seriously. They're just works of "flesh and fluids." It's a funny sentiment, but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma keeps asking whether art can actually be taken too seriously. And, perhaps more provocatively, whether slashers can be called art when its story is merely an 85-minute excuse to provide five minutes of softcore pornography and a series of increasingly elaborate kills.

Schoenbrun's film provides its own answer. This is unquestionably a work of art, and its artificiality is essential to that argument. The world of Camp Miasma feels less like a physical location than a memory reconstructed from fragments: fake snow, matte paintings, and plastic effects combine into an intentionally dreamlike production design. Spot-on recreations of the original Camp Miasma are interspersed throughout, while 35mm cinematography and crackling sound give the images the texture of something simultaneously ancient and newly unearthed.

Even Little Death, the franchise's iconic killer, looks like a warped cousin of Pyramid Head from the Silent Hill series, except with a cube for a head. It's ridiculous, sinister, and unmistakably artificial, the embodiment of a movie that wants to expose the machinery behind horror while still believing in its power.

The result is a fascinating collision between slasher convention and personal expression. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma knows that horror can be reduced to sex, death, flesh, and fluids. But it also knows that those things can become something more when an artist is allowed to put themselves inside the formula. The real horror isn't necessarily the killer waiting in the woods. Sometimes it's the studio deciding exactly what your art is allowed to mean.

Mubi will release Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in select theaters on August 07th.