How Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Reinvented Horror Heroine Fashion

3 min read

In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the clothing helps illuminate a story of surreal spiraling desire. The new, distinctly queer meta-slasher film written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun is a treasure trove of classic horror film references through the 2026 gaze, starring Hannah Einbinder (Kris) and Gillian Anderson (Billy). Kris is a young director hired to revive the imaginary Camp Miasma slasher franchise that has grown stale over the years. She becomes obsessed with tracking down Billy Presley, the star of the original 1983 film. Once the duo meets, campy psychosexual madness ensues.

From the first time we see Kris on screen, she is almost positioned as distinctly anti-fashion. She could be anyone. She wears a chunky burgundy puffer coat, old impractical pilling mittens, and baggy sweaters. The most standout thing about her is her Pi stone necklace, strung from a leather cord, popping out of her puffer coat even when she’s trudging through the snow with her suitcase. In her mind, she is on her way to find Billy and make a movie. But the necklace is the first interesting clue: the Pi stone represents the eternal loop of life, death, and spiritual evolution, and according to ancient traditions, the center hole allows energy to circulate freely. It parallels perfectly with a hole at the bottom of Camp Miasma’s lake, which will become extremely important as the film evolves.

Kris and Billy’s fashion contrasts in TeenageSex and Death at Camp Miasma

When Kris meets Billy, we see fashion on the opposite end of the spectrum. Billy’s old Hollywood-style blond curls spiral underneath wrapped turbans topped with jewels. While Hannah looks like she wears old misshapen pink striped pajamas and fuzzy animal slippers, Billy is a vision in vintage 1940s velvet dressing gowns and fantastic hats. Costume designer Kendra Terpenning pulled authentic vintage and antique pieces for the occasion, taking the belt off one of the vintage dresses Billy wears and having a milliner build a custom matching hat from it. “Billy is dripping in silks and furs and velvets and just marching around that camp in snow and stilettos,” says Terpenning. “I’ve never been prouder of something I’ve put up on camera.”

But it’s the final girl scene that remains most iconic when it comes to the costumes. “Something that Hannah said was we really wanted to play with the female gaze for the female gaze,” says Terpenning, who referenced the 1980 Friday the 13th film for the look. “Jane is brilliant at honoring and subverting tropes that we’ve seen in films about sexuality, about gender, about the way that they’ve been used in the cultural conversation historically.”

Kris in TeenageSex and Death at Camp Miasma

Extensive fittings that involved consultation from ballet designers (and lots of blood dyeing) took place to create an outfit worthy of Kris and Billy’s final rendezvous. Billy wears a fully custom 1940s-inspired slip and duster. The film has a film-within-a-film effect that flips between 2026 and 1983, which influenced Kris’s final look most.

The ‘Final Girl’ look in TeenageSex and Death at Camp Miasma

Kris wears Bass Pro Shops boots, Canadian wool camping socks, custom underwear, and a Gap T-shirt that was cropped and tailored, selected for its perfectly innocent, girlish pointelle. “We did a lot of really sneaky, quiet, invisible work to make sure that this costume did exactly what we needed it to do on camera,” adds Terpenning. “It’s almost closer to shapewear than underwear, but with the appearance of underwear on the outside and era-correct underwear. The way that a bra looked and supported you in 1983 is really different from what we have today. We didn’t have the creation of the T-shirt bra. So we didn’t want this just perfectly smoothed out, almost sort of anonymous breast-shaped look to it.”

Terpenning specifically chose a casual, everyday cotton for maximum blood absorption, too. “The blood dye work that you see in the poster for our final girls was done in my mom and dad’s backyard,” Terpenning says with a laugh. And through it all, the talismanic necklace persists.