No one can merge heartfelt homages to popular culture with deveatating emotional experiences quite like Jane Schoenbrun. While their first feature, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, saw a lonely teenager funnel her existence through an obsession of online creepypasta, I Saw The TV Glow delivered a more nuanced look at 90s teens trying to make sense of their crumbling reality via repeated viewings of a cult TV show. However, both of these fascinating features only seem like a dry run for Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, a horror-themed, queer romance that delves deep into the cinematic language of slasher movies to deliver possibly one of the most stunning experiences of the year.
Loaded with obsessive knowledge about a sub-genre that doesn’t always get the credit it deserves, and armed with a beguiling grasp on a rubber meta-reality that would make Wes Craven’s New Nightmare scramble to take it’s meds, Schoenbrun’s insanely enjoyable opus aims to straddle the gap between queer art-house and obsessive horror fandom like never before.
Queer filmmaker Kris Williams has been handed the keys to the Camp Miasma franchise in the hope that her fresh look at the series that will elevate the reboot after countless shitty sequels have succeeded in diluting the brand. However, while the series – which predominantly features vent-headed, spear carrying, berserker, Little Death – produced such follow-ups as Camp Miasma Part VII: Psychic Warriors and the time travelling Medieval Miasma, Kris has a personal connection to the franchise despite bring hired to navigate some of the more dated and transphobic elements of the classic lore.
Eager to deep dive into the history of the original to help her break the story, Kris heads to the Pacific Northwest to interview Billy Presley, the first film’s final girl who lives a reclusive life in the actual camp group where the first film was shot. Furthermore, Billy seems more than a little eccentric and is fairly obsessed with franchise antagonist, Little Death, whom she seems to think is real, but soon the two form a genuine attachment that gradually turns into something more powerful.
Dissatisfied with the polyamorous relationship she’s currently in, Kris soon finds herself drawn even more to the former actress, and while Kris hopes to cast Billy in her upcoming reboot, soon she finds herself confessing to her idol about more personal things, like her hang ups about sex. But while the pair screen Camp Miasma one night, Kris starts to see the films in a far more imersive way than ever before. With Billy’s insistence that Little Death is real and exists beneath the surface of the lake, reality and fantasy will start to shift as the actress leads her would-be director to embrace her sexuality more than ever before.
There are a few ways you can approach Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, with all of them proving to be incredibly incisive and emotionally powerful. The first is that for all of its cinema-literate window dressing, the real core of the film is the queer romance that blossoms between the reclusive Billy and the sexually stunted Kris, who over thinks everything but isn’t particularly great at feeling or letting go. As the two grow closer over their respective, complex relationships to the original Camp Miasma movie, Kris is able to work out her issues in fantastical ways that are extremely difficult to verbalise without it seeming problematic. It’s here that Schoenbrun adds another layer by using both the themes of sensuality and horror to skillfully verbalise something that’s still fairly taboo – that a lot of young horror fans tend to experience their sexual awakening (both gay or straight) during the sex=death equations of the horror genre. It’s no accident the director named their slasher Little Death (the French description for orgasm), and they deftly explain why dated and sometimes problematic slasher pics can be so powerful when experienced at a formative age.
As wonderful as this all is, it’s the layer that shows just how much Schoenbrun appreciates the slasher genre that really makes the film so much fun. As a long time supporter of the Friday The 13th franchise, it’s been quite the experience to see younger filmmakers embrace and play with the conventions in experimental, art-house-y type ways like the shot entirely with the killer’s POV In A Violent Nature. The sheer detail that’s been brought to bare is nothing short of stunning as the on-screen franchise blends the basics and merchandise of Camp Crystal Lake (logo fonts, VHS covers, basic plot details, homage kills) with the iffy trans representation of the Sleepaway Camp films.
However, while Schoenbrun obviously has a great love for the genre, they also don’t let some of the more questionable aspects get away scott free either – especially after knowing jabs at the makers of The Burning (check the producer credits) and amusing digs at the misogynistic/homophobic nature that the films sometimes play with. However, the love is real and the film fully embraces all of it – but rather than being a Scary Movie spoof, or a Scream style deconstruction, Camp Miasma plays more like a fantasy rom-com that’s ridiculously horror literate. Of course, it goes without saying that both Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are both magnificent as the awkward Kris and the eccentric Billy who carries more than a little of Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond, and their subsequent romance proves to be genuinely touching.
As a result, there’s precious little scares, but that’s fine, as Schoenbrun instead goes for a rainbow-coloured, Lynchian surrealism, that throws in obvious, but sumptuous matt painting backgrounds, ludicrous blood geysers erupting from neck stumps and – in the ridiculously counterintuitive design of Little Death – one of the most strangely endearing masked killers in ages. In fact, a film-within-a-film sequence where Little Death slaughters an entire room of camp counsellors to Counting Crows “Long December” merges all of the movie’s themes together in a moment that’s positively euphoric.
While willfully very strange and loaded with in-jokes not everyone will get, I’d suggest that Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma somehow is still the most accessible of Schoenbrun’s “Screen Trilogy”, that’s used various technologies as a to for some sort of disturbing self discovery. Of course, some expecting a straight slasher (pun intended) or even a more standard killer spoof will be utterly confounded by the phantasmagoric stew of Queer allegory and slasher worship that’s openly on display. But for a film with such potentially weighty themes behind it, the trip to Camp Miasma proves to be an endearing cheerful ride.
A hallucinogenic comedy, an absurdist love letter to slasher movies, a metaphor for sexual liberation regardless of your sexuality, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is all of these things and a whole lot more. If this is the end of Jane Schoenbrun’s series of films based on obsession over alterative popular culture, it certainly goes out on a high, as it managed to give me a whole new appreciation for a much-maligned sub-genre I grew up with.
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