$251,500 on five screens. $50,300 per-screen average. A 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Camp Miasma box office Jane Schoenbrun delivered on opening weekend does not belong to a film arriving cold into the marketplace.
Fangoria called the per-screen average stellar and noted that these are grosses usually reserved for awards contenders. Deadline’s specialty roundup contextualized the opening against other 2026 limited releases without asking where the audience came from. Variety covered the two films as chapters in Schoenbrun’s artistic biography.
I Saw the TV Glow‘s Two Years of Audience Infrastructure
I Saw the TV Glow (2024) follows two teenagers bonding over a Buffy-coded TV show called The Pink Opaque, and its trans allegory immediately resonated with queer viewers in ways that extended well past its theatrical run. By November 2024, the film had generated a viral TikTok trend set to Yeule’s “Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”, driven by queer users, particularly those questioning their gender, finding the film’s allegory personally resonant months after release.
The clearest single piece of evidence is this: the same weekend Camp Miasma opened in theaters, a national horror publication ran a full deep retrospective on I Saw the TV Glow. A national horror publication chose that exact moment to run a deep retrospective on Schoenbrun’s previous film. That timing reflects an audience being actively maintained and primed, not a coincidence in the publishing calendar.
The infrastructure, then: two years of podcast coverage, queer community word-of-mouth, sustained TikTok presence, and ongoing critical conversation. None of that shows up in ISTTG’s $5 million gross. All of it showed up at the Angelika Film Center in New York, which recorded its largest opening weekend ever for Camp Miasma at $82K, a localized demand concentration that does not happen without a pre-existing community.
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What the Numbers Mean for Queer Horror Box Office
For contrast: Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man opened the same weekend to $2 million in wide release. Wide release, softer per-screen efficiency. Camp Miasma opened on five screens with Mubi in key markets and landed as the second-strongest per-screen average of that specialty frame, just behind Matt Johnson’s Tony at $58,159. Per Deadline, it landed among the year’s best limited openers. That result belongs to the per-screen metric, not the total gross, which is exactly the metric that matters for a distributor deciding whether to expand.
Variety frames ISTTG and Camp Miasma as stages in Schoenbrun’s personal artistic evolution. An artist can evolve tonally and still need an audience to show up for the new work. Camp Miasma stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson and arrives with a 98% approval rating, but comparable cast recognition and critical scores have opened softer on five screens without an auteur community behind them. The cast and the reviews did not produce $50,300 per screen. The two years of community life that preceded it did.
If the two-film arc model holds, it suggests something worth watching for queer horror specifically: build a cult audience with the first film, convert it on the second. That is a path that does not require studio infrastructure or franchise IP. It requires an audience that stayed.