Jack Haven doesn't speak a single line in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and critics are calling their performance the film's beating heart anyway. As Little Death, a masked, bigender camper-turned-killer, Haven takes one of horror's most damaging tropes and, without a word of dialogue, makes it human.

The film, which reunites Haven with Schoenbrun after 2024's acclaimed I Saw the TV Glow, follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer filmmaker hired to reboot a dying slasher franchise, and Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive actress from the original film. As Kris digs into the Miasma lore, she learns Little Death isn't just a movie monster but something closer to a god, living at the bottom of a lake and conjuring the massacres that built the franchise around him.

A Trope With a Long, Ugly History

Horror has leaned on gender-bending killers for decades: Norman Bates dressing as his dead mother in Psycho, Buffalo Bill sewing a

Sources: them., Out, GLAAD

Cover photo: Cate Barton, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

jack haven

Jack Haven Turns Horror's Trans Killer Trope Inside Out in Camp Miasma