But Friday the 13th was definitely in the air this year, and on Halloween night, my wife and I watched the other piece of 2026 popular culture that was most in conversation with the series: Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
You may recall -- though you'd have to have a stupid amount of memory reserved for me and my blog -- that I tried to watch this in the cinema during MIFF. It was going to be the first half of a double feature with my regularly scheduled MIFF movie, Rose of Nevada, but I arrived at the theater to find it unexpectedly sold out. So I pivoted to another MIFF movie that was about to start, Joybubbles, which was way better than Rose of Nevada.
I'm glad it worked out that way, not only because I wouldn't have seen Joybubbles otherwise, but because that allowed me to save Camp Miasma for Halloween, when it was the perfect capper to a month of watching movies that play with the tropes of horny teenagers having sex and getting slaughtered in and around a camp.
The only problem? I'm not sure how much this is actually a horror movie. But more on that in a minute.
First, let's establish just how much Schoenbrun thinks of their Camp Miasma as a direct stand in for Camp Crystal Lake, the setting for most of the Friday the 13th movies. It goes way beyond both being camps.
1) The killer in this movie, seen in the poster above, was drowned by other campers in a bullying incident, just like Jason Voorhees. Though this time it was an intentional drowning, not just bullying leading to neglect and accidental drowning.
2) Characters keep talking about how the killer, nicknamed Little Death, is "still there at the bottom of the lake" -- just like Jason Voorhees.
3) This is a movie about rebooting a famous horror series, so we get a lot about the actual series, including newspaper clippings about many movies with similar titles -- including one in which Little Death "takes Manhattan."
That's probably enough for you to know that yeah, Friday the 13th was not only an inspiration for Schoenbrun, but it was the direct target of a very explicit sort of parody.
Which is kind of the trouble with watching this movie on Halloween night, if you are trying to gin up some scares for yourself. Being scary might be like fourth or fifth on the list of the things Schoenbrun is trying to do with this movie.
Their talent for a really unsettling image, as seen in We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, is still present. And I did get a chill a couple times during this movie.
But the things Schoenbrun is doing ahead of being scary? Yes I've got a list for that too, but I'm not listing these things in order because they are all mixed up together.
1) Being romantic. This is ends up being a quite earnest portrayal of a connection that occurs between the two main characters. Despite the bleak tone of their previous two films, you might even think Schoenbrun had an optimistic view of life and love.
2) Being funny. There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments here. Schoenbrun's previous two films contained ... let me pause to count ... zero of those.
3) Being queer. I thought the main character, played by Hannah Einbender, was supposed to be trans, and that the actor was trans. Looking it up, I see Einbender is a bisexual woman, and the character says she/they go by "she/they pronouns" but has the biology of a woman. But yes, trans themes run aplenty here, as you might expect, including the fact that the drowned camper who became Little Death was known to campers as a "gender switcher," literally swapping genders on different days of the week. This is what caused them to kill the camper, and is also the bit of transphobia the studio is trying to correct in the IP's history by hiring a queer person to direct the reboot.
4) Being a satire. That is not necessarily the same thing as being funny, so I will list it separately.
Then they get to being scary.
So I wouldn't say it's a disconnect with Halloween, since it engages with one of the longest-running horror franchises of all time, that helped establish the tropes for a million other horror movies. (Even though, as I concluded, most of the movies in that long-running series are pretty bad.)
But I was hoping my skin would crawl a few more times than it actually did.
Still, this might be, narrowly, my favorite Schoenbrun movie, from beginning to end. I think the highs of I Saw the TV Glow might be higher, but I was pretty put off by the way that movie ends in a weird sort of whimper. World's Fair has some spooky images as well but is fairly low energy and unsurprisingly basic for a first effort.
Camp Miasma has things like a comically brutal slaughter, only half seen because the camera is always facing Little Death from directly in front of them, that is scored to the sentimental ballad "A Long December" by the Counting Crows. Believe me, it works.
Oh, and because I appear to be on the lookout for these now, or they are becoming more common, there are two split dopter shots in this movie, which was pretty cool.
It just doesn't scare me, and that's okay.
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