“That movie was so Gen Z,” I overheard a moviegoer say while walking out of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. At first, it sounded like a throwaway comment, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher is deeply rooted in the way a generation consumes media, dissects it, and sometimes uses it as a substitute for real-world intimacy.

The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer filmmaker hired to revive the Camp Miasma slasher franchise, who travels to the original filming location to meet Billy (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played its iconic final girl. Once inside, reality starts to feel like a heightened world existing just outside our own.

That’s also where the “very Gen Z” comment starts to make sense. Kris has grown up immersed in horror, fandom and the constant consumption and analysis of media, using the films that shaped her as a way to understand her own sexuality, identity and intimacy. Schoenbrun taps into a generation that can dissect everything online yet still struggle with genuine connection.

Schoenbrun has been building toward this for years. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair explored loneliness, identity, and dissociation through an online horror game, while I Saw the TV Glow pushed those ideas even further, using horror and ’90s television as a metaphor for queer identity and the struggle to understand yourself. With Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun brings that same fascination with identity and media into a much more playful, accessible slasher. They’re doing something genuinely exciting for queer cinema and the horror genre, proving that queer stories don’t need to fit neatly into one box.

“That movie was so Gen Z,” I overheard a moviegoer say while walking out of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. At first, it sounded like a throwaway comment, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher is deeply rooted in the way a generation consumes media, dissects it, and sometimes uses it as a substitute for real-world intimacy.

The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer filmmaker hired to revive the Camp Miasma slasher franchise, who travels to the original filming location to meet Billy (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played its iconic final girl. Once inside, reality starts to feel like a heightened world existing just outside our own.

That’s also where the “very Gen Z” comment starts to make sense. Kris has grown up immersed in horror, fandom and the constant consumption and analysis of media, using the films that shaped her as a way to understand her own sexuality, identity and intimacy. Schoenbrun taps into a generation that can dissect everything online yet still struggle with genuine connection.

Schoenbrun has been building toward this for years. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair explored loneliness, identity, and dissociation through an online horror game, while I Saw the TV Glow pushed those ideas even further, using horror and ’90s television as a metaphor for queer identity and the struggle to understand yourself. With Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun brings that same fascination with identity and media into a much more playful, accessible slasher. They’re doing something genuinely exciting for queer cinema and the horror genre, proving that queer stories don’t need to fit neatly into one box.