What follows is impalement and orgasm in the same instant—one spear through both women, blood passing from Billy’s mouth onto Kris’s upturned face—and when their breathing stops, the hole at the bottom of the lake pushes out a fresh videotape.
Schoenbrun realized they were trans while writing the 2021 release We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and began physically transitioning after finishing it. Where that film and its 2024 follow-up, I Saw the TV Glow, grew out of the frightening early days of coming out and transitioning, this one, Schoenbrun says, “came from the fun parts” of their transition—a period when, “for the first time, I think, since childhood, it felt like the world around me was real.”
Kris taking in a Miasma movie —Courtesy of Mubi
The film settles in early on with Kris alone in a hotel bed, a bucket of popcorn and Raisinets in hand, watching Camp Miasma Part VI: A New Beginning and writing the word “Desire” in her notebook, underlined twice. “People giggle at it,” Schoenbrun says. “What a pretentious, film-school-y thing to do.” The character, they add, is “a bit of a funhouse mirror” of them. The sequel Kris falls asleep to ends with a bloodied final girl refusing a cop’s reassurance that the killer is gone. It’s never over, she says, warning that “he’s still down there at the bottom of the lake” and “still hungry.”
That exchange starts an open question of power between the two, and their sensual fried-chicken dinner is the first round of the negotiation. Kris arrives with what Schoenbrun calls her “whole spiel down pat.” Billy “sees right through it” and needles her “in a way that gives her power in that dynamic.” “Well, you remade Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain,” she says of Kris’s feature debut film. Eventually, Billy correctsKris’s theories with just three words: The original Camp Miasma was never about monstrosity or gender trouble so much as simply “flesh and fluids.”
The tagline on the poster
A young Billy (left), played by Amanda Fix —Courtesy of MubiThat night, with the fire burning and the snacks close by, the film’s tagline gets put to the test. Smoking a joint in front of the mirror, Kris glimpses the young boy Little Death used to be, the bullied camper who, by franchise lore, was drowned in the lake. She emerges blissfully stoned, flirts with Billy, then confesses an intimate truth she has never told anyone: She can only approach pleasure by leaving herself, imagining her way into an old slasher film, becoming either the bookworm in Camp Miasma: Part II, or the girl in the outhouse in Camp Miasma: Part IV, or even young Billy in bed with that look in her eye.
For Schoenbrun, the meaning of this line is simple. “It’s about consent,” they say. One way to think about the film is that it is “structured like queer sex”: the long hangout, the shared joint, the rises and rests, the breaks for junk food. Good sex, in their view, involves “stopping and laughing for a while in the middle.”
Kris and Billy watch the original film together —Courtesy of Mubi
The next day, the courtship escalates: Billy screens her personal print of the original Camp Miasma for Kris. The film-within-the-film’s campfire story invents Little Death as a gender-confused child, mocked by campers, drowned in the lake, their death covered up. The killer that legend produced wears a camper’s uniform sheathed in plastic, a drowned thing the lake never quite gave back. “This part’s transphobic,” Kris announces, ever the annotator. Billy tells her to shut up.
Until this moment, the old film was styled as a half-remembered ’80s slasher, a collage of borrowed images. Then, in one roving, unbroken take set to the Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” the camera becomes Little Death, surfacing from the lake and cutting down counselor after counselor, the fuzzy, faded look of an old print giving way to a sleek, furious sequence that moves like a dance. Here, the movie hands the massacre to the monster the franchise built out of transphobic panic, and lets him move like a star. Schoenbrun grew up on that era’s horror villains imagined as men in dresses and gender-confused boys, from Sleepaway Camp to The Silence of the Lambs, and the sequence plays like those villains taking the wheel.
The hole where the movies come from
Billy delivers a monologue that holds the key to the film —Courtesy of MubiKris will have to wait another night for Billy’s answer. First, Kris torches her career. On a video call from her parked car, she delivers her reworked pitch to the studio: There is a hole at the bottom of Lake Miasma where the movies come from, and it predates the first film, predates even the murders that inspired it. When a sympathetic executive, Tracy (Jess McLeod), offers Kris a way out of her heady vision for the film—it’s a meta take, like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare—Kris refuses it flatly. The hole is realer than this call, she insists. If anything, the call is the movie. “You all are characters in a movie,” she tells them.
Underneath the bit is the film’s densest idea, the one the tape will make literal. “You think that you created these movies, but really these movies created you,” Schoenbrun says. Little Death, they explain, is the “eternal embodiment of desire, or of the orgasm.” It’s right there in the name, which in French is “la petite mort,” the old euphemism for climax. And he is forever restless for the next picture: “All right, now time for another one. Let’s pop another VHS in the slot.”We flatter ourselves, they say, that we steer the deep drives humming under everything we make. The thing under the water “is creating what we create, through us, as a vessel.” Translated out of theory: We don’t tell stories about desire so much as desire tells stories through us.That evening, back at camp beside a fire, Billy answers Kris’ question with the monologue that is the film’s spine. Filming the original’s sex scene at 24 and playing a character aged 17, she went somewhere far away in her head to survive a joyless first time with a creep on a grimy mattress—and something answered. “I caught a signal,” she says.Suddenly she was watching herself from across the room, creeping closer: the watcher and the one being watched at once. She was the killer, leering and breathing hard, and she was the girl on the bed with that look in her eye. “And then I came,” Billy recalls.
Little Death rises from the lake —Courtesy of Mubi
Then the lake opens. A vortex churns the surface, and a wave of light rolls across the snow, turning winter to summer, the “Welcome to Camp Tivoli” sign into “Welcome to Camp Miasma.” The women haven't slipped into a fantasy so much as crossed into the world of the original films—the summer camp slasher Kris grew up watching—and they direct it together as it happens. If the swerve feels characteristic, it is: Like Schoenbrun’s two previous films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, this one turns on someone crossing into a fiction—this time, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise itself. From here until morning, the movie plays it absolutely straight: Whatever this realm is, it is real enough to kill in.
What she runs into are people she knows. Her partner Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) arrives in a truck and is decapitated moments into the reunion by Little Death; Mari’s boyfriend Thor barely gets through a friendly hello before his blood sprays the headlights. Kris’s agent (Sarah Sherman) turns up hoping to workshop the failed pitch and takes four arrows. The studio executives appear in the trees with notes—they get the allegory of her film pitch, they’d just like it a “little bit more commercial”—before being speared mid-sentence.
What actually happens in Bunk 5
Billy sets the stage for the climax —Courtesy of MubiKris bursts into Bunk 5 gasping. You made it, Billy soothes, adding that it’s just play. “It doesn’t feel like play, Billy,” Kris says. “I know,” Billy answers. “But it is.” Everything the film taught them converges on the bed. Billy lies over her, tells her she’s almost there, almost dead, and asks her to do what Billy did on that mattress decades ago: watch herself through his eyes. Kris does. Billy once left her body to survive a scene; Kris leaves hers to arrive in one.We enter Little Death’s perspective, taking in the blue door, the candles on the railing, the slow approach down the hallway, while Kris narrates her own stalking in a mounting gasp: He’s walking inside, he’s coming closer, she can see herself now. Terror is no longer distinguishable from arousal. “Billy, I don’t want to die,” she pleads, and then, in the same breath, “Billy, please don’t leave me.” Billy stays. The spear comes down through them both, and Einbinder plays the instant of it with astonishing precision: Kris’s face moving from something like surprise into unmistakable release, her eyes fluttering as the blood arrives.
Little Death had final cut, and this was it. For anyone who left the theater asking who made the movie, that is the answer: he did.
The morning after —Courtesy of Mubi
Were Billy and Kris ever really dead? “They die, but it’s not a permanent death. It’s fictional in some way. It’s in the land of metaphor, poetry,” Schoenbrun says. “It’s a little death. It’s not the same thing as a big death, and it allows them a shedding of something, probably shame. That’s quite healthy.” By the killer’s own name, it could never have been otherwise.
What happens there seems minor but for Schoenbrun, close to the bone. Still bloody in last night’s clothing, the two fill a cart with candy and bicker contentedly about the state of the candy industry—arguably also a wink at the state of film. “We’re living in the golden age of gummy candy,” Kris says. A man at the coffee stand stares and shakes his head—a nod to Schoenbrun’s own experience. “The way that dude by the coffee stand is looking at these two women in their underwear covered in blood is kind of how I always feel at a roadside gas station as a trans person,” Schoenbrun says.
Then Kris drifts outside, her face clouding, followed by Billy. “He’s still down there, you know, at the bottom of the lake,” she says. “He’s still hungry.” It is, nearly word for word, the warning the final girl gave at the end of Camp Miasma: Part VI, the one Kris heard half-asleep in a hotel bed four days and a lifetime ago—except the warning now belongs to Kris, and it is about to stop being a warning at all. “Can you feel it? He’ll be back soon to feed again,” Kris says. Her expression tips from worry into wonder, and the wonder becomes a smile, and the smile widens. Billy, watching her, smiles too.
The person in the movie
Seen whole, the ending is a transfer of ownership. Kris appeared toward the start of the film alone in a bed, annotating desire from a safe distance; she closes it inside the frame she used to study, holding the hand of the woman whose look she spent a lifetime decoding, speaking what may be the franchise’s scariest line with a grin. The line completes its long rotation, too. What began as a reassurance—none of this can touch you—was never quite true. The movies touched Kris as a child, before she could spell out their titles. What Billy made of the words instead was a promise between two people at play: go as far as you need to, because you can always stop. Here, by the final shot, nobody wants to stop.
“Now she’s entered the movie,” Schoenbrun says. “She’s no longer the person in the audience calling out ‘split diopter.’ She’s the person in the movie who people are going ‘split diopter’ to.” That choice, as they see it, is a “beautiful” one and very much in the larger “language” of their film. Schoenbrun has started saying this—“split diopter!”—at screenings, and they’re serious about it. If the film is playing somewhere in 10 years, they hope audiences will treat Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma the way longtime fans treat The Rocky Horror Picture Show, hurling the line back at the screen with glee, a ritual they’d like to “lightly encourage” starting now.
It’s the rare ending that comes with instructions for loving it, and they suit the film. Somewhere down the line, in a theater at midnight, a crowd may see Kris’s blood-streaked face fill the frame once again, calling out to her the way Kris once called to the film-within-a-film—and the signal, still hungry, will have found its next set of eyes.
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