Summer is winding down, but it’s not too late to check into camp. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, is a meta queer slasher that deconstructs and pays homage to the genre.
The film stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an up-and-coming indie director tasked with directing a reboot of the popular “Camp Miasma” horror films. It’s a “zombie IP” with a problematic transphobic origin story, and the studio is desperate to have it rehabilitated so they can profit off it again.
While working on her idea for the film, Kris meets with the first film’s “final girl,” actress Billy (Gillian Anderson), who now lives in isolation at the campsite where the films were shot.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Schoenbrun’s most accessible work yet, which is still not to say it’s a straightforward film. The story is layered metaphors with a heavy dose of surrealism that heightens towards the end of the film as Kris finds herself inside a Camp Miasma film of her own making.
From the movie slasher’s name “Little Death” (a reference to the French phrase la petite mort that describes post orgasm sensation) to the intentionally obvious seams showing in the campsite set (fake snow, painted backdrops), there are many winking elements.
The movie wears its references on its sleeve, sometimes citing them by name, including Friday the 13th, Sunset Boulevard, and horror master Wes Craven. Subtle, this film is not.
Yet to say it’s a film within a film would be both accurate and too simplistic a way to describe its deconstruction.
While I Saw The TV Glow was largely about identity and repression, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is about desire and repression. More overt metaphors, like Kris’s obsession with candy and love for the erotic 80s slasher (so much penetration!), marry with surreal elements to explore her own discomfort with intimacy and sexual pleasure.
She finds a kindred spirit in Billy, who’s found a way to own her sexuality after her trauma on the Camp Miasma films with a strange psychic connection with Little Death. The things that happen to Kris and Billy as the film unfolds are as real as they want them to be, empowered and given final cut over their own experiences.
“If it gets too real, you can always turn it off,” Billy tells Kris.
Fans of Hacks will find some similarities between Ava and the neurotic Kris, but that doesn’t cheapen Einbinder’s performance, which requires a much more physical vulnerability. Her chemistry with Anderson sizzles on the screen, and the two characters’ weirdness makes their connection even more endearing.
The movie manages an exquisite blend of strange, tender, and laugh-out-loud funny. While Kris and Billy’s relationship is played as sincere, there are a slew of supporting characters, both in world and in the Camp Miasma film screened by the two, who poke at tropes and stereotypes that serve as cannon fodder for jokes and Little Death’s spear.
For those wondering, “Is it scary?” the answer is not really. Although technically a horror film, the story relies on sexual tension, not jump scares, to keep you glued to the screen.
The horror elements are usually broadcast far in advance (Kris says out loud at one point she’s expecting a jump scare) and purposefully over the top as homage to the schlocky franchise Camp Miasma has become. The blood squirting from Little Death’s victims looks like it could be the filling of one of the many candies Kris eats throughout the film.
Little Death’s biggest murder spree is soundtracked not to a haunting John Carpenter score but to the soft rock ballad “A Long December” by Counting Crows. It’s choices like these that undercut the violence with humor while still giving horror fans their fill of blood.
Broader audiences might chafe at some of the headier themes, but fans of slashers and queer horror will adopt Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma as an instant cult classic.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases in theaters on August 7.