“If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.”

That’s the mantra repeated several times in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the new slasher from director Jane Schoenbrun, that serves as a follow up to their 2024 beloved critical hit, I Saw the TV Glow. At it’s heart, that mantra is what this strange, meta, referential film is really about: the safe kind of fear. And, yes, OK, kinky lesbian sex, also. Everyone say, “Thank you, Jane Schoenbrun.”

[Fair warning: Plot spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma ahead!]

Written and directed by Schoenbrun, Camp Miasma takes a meta approach to the slasher genre. Hannah Einbinder stars as Kris Williams, a “Sundance darling” queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot a fictional, problematic, cult-classic horror franchise known as Camp Miasma. (Basically, Friday the 13th.) Kris tracks down the film’s OG final girl, Billy Presley (played by Gillian Anderson), who has retreated from public life and lives as a recluse on the abandoned camp ground where the first film was shot.

The mutual attraction between the two women is immediate. After some dancing around each other—and after a sexually charged viewing of the original Miasma film, including a scene where the young Billy Preston loses her virginity—Kris and Billy give in to their desires. But Kris has a problem: She watched way too many disturbing horror movies at a young, impressionable age, and it’s messed with her head. In middle of a picture-perfect romantasy hook-up—literally in front of a crackling fireplace, in a remote cabin in the woods—Kris is forced to halt the sexy times. She apologizes profusely. “I’m so bad at sex,” she admits to Billy.

Billy comforts Kris, flipping on a dime from femme fatale seductress to maternal mentor. She offers Kris a cozy blanket, some s’mores, and a sympathetic ear.

“Sex seems so easy for so many people, but I never seem to get there with someone else unless I’m really far away in my head,” Kris explains.

Where is it that she goes? To the horny, terrifying world of Camp Miasma, the movie responsible for her sexual awakening when she was just 8 years old. Kris imagines she’s just like Billy’s character in the film, “young and nubile.” She imagines being coerced, or even forced, into sex, before she’s ready. She imagines fleeing from the psychotic serial killer, Little Death, with her breasts bouncing, nipples piercing through her skimpy clothes. In other words, she imagines herself in the overly sexualized, torture porn world that was the backbone of ’80s slasher flicks.

Kris is not just ashamed of her desires. She’s downright terrified of them. Surely, she is a bad, violent person for harboring these fantasies. Surely, indulging in them would make her an even worse, even more violent person. Surely, if she has the kind of sex she wants, something bad would happen.

But Billy assures Kris that, like a movie, her fantasies are just “play.” It’s all pretend. It’s all safe. And, Billy adds, quoting the fictional director of her fictional slasher franchise, “If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.”

So, together, Billy and Kris create a “movie” that Kris can, well, get off to. The sexual fantasy includes all the classics: Getting sexualized by the creepy gas station attendant, watching your friends get brutally murdered in front of you, and running for your life in your underwear. Little Death is coming. Oh, he’s coming. He’s coming—he’s here! (Now would be a good time to point out that a less-commonly-used French word for “orgasm” is “la petite mort,” which literally translates to Little Death.)

In a talk back after a screening of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at the Angelika Theater in New York City on Saturday, Schoenbrun explained they were inspired to make the movie based on their own journey of overcoming sexual trauma, post-transition.

“Fear and desire—those two things really do sit near each other. It’s something like the thrill of the roller coaster, right? The thrill of danger that you know is actually safe,” Schoenbrun said. “When you’re a kid, something on a screen can have a little more power than it does in in adult life. Staying up too late and watching something scary, you’re like, ‘Am I in danger?’ But you also know you’re not.”

Schoenbrun compared the ritual of sitting down to watch a scary movie as a kid—knowing you’re about to traumatize yourself, but in a safe way—to the process of facing your desires, even when those desires feel scary.

“That felt like an interesting way to talk about what the film is like really about, which is overcoming sexual trauma,” Schoenbrun explained. “Learning how to—when sex also feels like a scary or unsafe thing—how to find a way for it to be the safe kind of scary.”

The climax of the movie doubles as Kris’s climax in another sense.

“The structure of the movie is like the movie’s having sex,” Schoenbrun noted. “Specifically the kind of sex that I was having when I was learning how to be more comfortable sexually. Like, first you’re just gonna talk for a long time. You’re gonna eat some garbage. You’re gonna keep some of that garbage on hand for afterwards. You’re gonna watch a bunch of shit.”

And, of course, if any of the shit you’re watching gets too real, you can always turn it off.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing select theaters.