Hannah Einbinder plays Kris Williams, a twenty-nine-year-old independent filmmaker hired to reboot Camp Miasma in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The setup gives the movie its businesslike edge: a queer creator is handed a franchise that was built in the nineteen-eighties, spread through sequels and spinoffs, and later drew criticism as transphobic.
Camp Miasma and Kris Williams
Jane Schoenbrun makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma her third dramatic feature, and the premise is built around filmmaking rather than simple nostalgia. Kris has already turned a previous project into a reënactment of the murder scene in Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain, which makes the reboot assignment feel less like a generic studio note and more like a test of how far her point of view can bend a franchise with its own mythology.
Kris is not arriving cold. She has been obsessed with Camp Miasma since she was eight, and that childhood fixation is part of the job description here: the studio wants her to make the property “elevated, a.k.a. woke.” That wording places the reboot in direct tension with the franchise’s earlier reputation, because the same title that once drew protests from the religious right is now being recast through a queer filmmaker who understands how loaded the material has become.
Billy Presley in isolation
Sarah Sherman plays Kris’s agent, while Billy Presley is the other figure the story keeps pulling toward. Amanda Fix played Squeak, the teen-age camp counsellor in the first installment, and Billy Presley later refused roles in the sequels, never appeared in another movie, and now has no public presence at all. In the film, Gillian Anderson plays Presley in her sixties, living in self-imposed isolation at a remote compound in the Pacific Northwest.
That is where the plot leaves the safe territory of a standard reboot assignment. Presley invites Kris to her compound, and the directorial dance of seduction turns into an actual seduction. The relationship turns professional access into personal leverage, with the reboot no longer just about updating a franchise but about getting close to the person who once helped define it.
A franchise built to haunt itself
Camp Miasma carries the kind of backstory that makes any remake fight with its own source material. Launched in the nineteen-eighties, it spawned many sequels and spinoffs, an arcade game, a comic book, and a slew of merchandise, so Schoenbrun is not dealing with a small cult title but with a property that already learned how to sell itself across formats. Scenes from across the franchise play as films within the film, which means the reboot has to negotiate not just one original but the whole stack of versions that followed.
The clean reading is that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma treats the reboot as a collision between authorship and ownership. Kris Williams gets the mandate, but Presley still holds the mythology, and the film’s sharpest move is putting those two forces in the same room. For viewers, that is the hook: not whether Camp Miasma can be revived, but who gets to decide what it means when it comes back.
