A young filmmaker seeks out the reclusive star of the cult horror franchise she has been tasked with resurrecting.
Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Jane Schoenbrun
Starring: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Fix, Arthur Conti, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, Jasmin Savoy Brown
Broadly speaking, and when we're discussing this particular genre broad strokes is probably the best way forward, the classic slasher canon can be sliced into two distinct modes: the suburban slasher (A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Slumber Party Massacre: films about violence and terror invading American suburban dreams) or the summer camp slasher. The last one is my favourite type; I understand that Halloween is an objectively better film than Friday the 13th but it is the latter's leafy heat, promise of sticky sex ("flesh and fluids" HRH Gillian Anderson's mature scream queen will distantly intone) and unknowable terrains that will always have me plumping for Sean S. Cunningham's rip-off (and similarly insisting upon watching Sleepaway Camp, another Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma touchstone, every birthday). Even apart from the baroque intent of The Burning et al, the American tradition of summer camp is a rite of passage; the heavy forests, deep waters, log cabins are liminal features of a threshold zone wherein young lives are catalysed and potentially changed forever.
The great filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun recognises this dynamic and explores it with passionate insight in their fifth film, the hotly anticipated Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The insouciant functionality of the title sets up the film's arch and affectionate tone (the bilabial - steady - poetry of the phrase "Camp Miasma" - mmm), and after a bravura gory opening which reassures the film's sort-of-meta intent, the credits sequence consolidates the approach with the best opening titles ever: a montage of merchandise, press clippings, toys, lobby cards which pertain to the rise, fall and cultural impact of in-film horror franchise "Camp Miasma." The mosaic has it all; N64 games, wind up toys, knock off Smiffy's costumes of the central killer – instant icon Little Death, replete in Patrick Bateman plastic overalls and the world's most absurd mask; a huge box of concentric squares, mimicking the matte aperture of an antique movie camera. Anyone with a passing affection for pop culture will be touched. If you're the kid who grew up scrambling through Fangoria and other film mags, collecting the bibs and bobs of rare slasher paraphernalia (Freddy Krueger bouncy ball?) then the loving detail involved in the sequence might well move you to tears.
"Camp Miasma" is a straightforward Friday the 13th expropriation, as evidenced by the similar title font, and pile of VHS which tracks accordingly to the Paramount franchise (an entry where Little Death goes to Manhattan apparently marks a low point in the series...). The correlation is unambiguous because genre connoisseur Schoenbrun knows precisely what they are doing, and how to use the mythical resonance of the leafy slasher to shape their allegory (Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma isn't really about the genre at all: Schoenbrun is instead interested in what slashers meant to us). Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a Gen Z cusp queer filmmaker commissioned to helm a reboot of the Camp Miasma franchise. We see her facetime a girlfriend (Jasmin Savoy Brown), who casually implies that she's about to have sex with a bisexual hipster called Thor, as per the consensually poly parameters of her and Kris' relationship - the kids, eh? This is an early indication towards Kris' sexual anhedonia, which is the key to understanding the surreal distortions and overlapping motifs of Schoenbrun's hyperreal erotic fable.
A girl has to put her energies into something, and so we pick up with Kris as she ventures into the northeast American hinterlands to track down Billy Presley, the original "Camp Miasma" final girl (played by an impossibly regal Gillian Anderson, and in wide eyed flashbacks by Amanda Fix). The journey purposefully mimics Annie's trip to Camp Crystal Lake almost 50 years ago, and, duly, Kris' satnav locates Billy living in the abandoned original Camp Tivoli as a Norma Desmond recluse (the film's references are almost comically on the nose: Swanson's emblematic character is namechecked twice, and Anderson is dressed to look like her, too. As Dylan Baker's funny studio exec observes, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is "a meta," but one that is up front and uninterested in trivial Easter egg hunts). What follows is a queer romance, which, as it blends dreams with footage of the original "Camp Miasma," along with deliberate fantasy, offers narratives within a narrative which is as homocentric nested as Little Death's headgear.
Kris confesses that for her, film is more authentic than actuality. In a crosscut to her ridiculous agent playing squash, the panels of the court read something along the lines of "this is your reality": an asinine world of clinical whites and empty air kisses (a side note - Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has some lovely jokes about the horror industry which blunt any of Ghostface's recent satirical swipes). In comparison, the location of Camp Tivoli is lushly cinematic in its artifice: at points Kris stands in front of a thick matte painting of snow laden firs, other times we see CGI created forests in an ever-changing fantasia spectacle. Billy, stoned and seemingly always on the verge of a rolling orgasm ("I like the dipping sauce"-!), intones that this is a "private alternate universe". As the two pensively become closer, scenes within the diegesis reflect moments from "Camp Miasma," the narrative working within its own aphroditic logic as Kris's (heartbreakingly late) sexuality blossoms; so closely linked as it is to the totemic blood and sex of slasher films.
With lithe bodies being exposed and violated, sex is specifically intrinsic to the leafy slasher (young people removed entirely from adult chaperones, skinny dipping, etc), and transness has been a motivating feature of the wider genre since Norman Bates confused himself with his own mother. As a matter of genre course, we see elements linked to transsexuality through the non-gender specific names of slasher heroes (honoured here), ever present physical dysphoria and the killers' emblematically ambiguous masks. Historically, the archetype reflected gender anxieties, and at times reductively aligned trans characters with the monstrous (cf. Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill). Here, however, Schoenbrun uses the existent trope to explore and celebrate trans identity. In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the presentation can be explicit, as regarding the origin of Little Death, a child living at camp who would be a girl one week and a boy the next, and whom the bullies inevitably drowned for who they were (with its chic black and white sets, this sequence is filmed ala the homoerotic flashbacks of LGBTQIA+ classic Sleepaway Camp), but also thematic, with the film/genre's use of POV reconnoitring how we are seen and how we wish to be perceived (at least, that is, I think - I am not trans, and while I can sympathise with issues which trans people face, and will always support my trans kinspeople, being someone who has always been blithely comfortable in their own skin, I cannot fully empathise or perhaps ever understand the situation fully: I look forward to reading a take on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma from a critic who does authentically identify as trans).
Perhaps a flaw is the exhibition of the retro-slasher which Billy and Kris watch in emotionally loaded scenes, which is unsound because "Camp Miasma" is too well produced for a '70s quickie cash-in, featuring elements such as a painstaking one-shot which tracks bopping camp counsellors in a dance scene (also, Little Death embarks upon an immediate massacre which doesn't in any way mirror the protracted stalk and slash dynamics of the OGs). Emphasising the cruciality of POV to the mode and its themes, Little Death (played by non-binary actor Jack Haven) is presented via a second person focalisation; the camera tight on them, via a rig, limiting our perspective to their mask and murderous motions: a cliché of the genre is the threat's point of view, but here we watch the killer and their release and little else. The theme of identity culminates in Kris's realisation that her sexuality is fundamentally linked to the slasher: for her, identifying with both killer and victim at the same time is the pierced heart of Eros. Fans can relate: I think of who I am, and my idolatry of Final Girls, the pedestal I placed them on as a boy (I wanted to live in Pi Kappa Sigma, and be bffs with Barb and Jess), the latent fetishization of their cuntiness (adult me squealing with delight at every single one of Madelyn Cline's costume changes in I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025). Like Kris, they made me who I am.
An indulgent response, perhaps, but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an intensely intimate film which generates deeply personal reactions. Like Schoenbrun's previous masterpieces, their movies are at once breathtakingly original but at the same time feel profoundly familiar, tapping into feelings you felt or dreamt before, a melancholy which is just at the edge of conscious understanding. Made explicitly within TikTok/Letterboxd social cultures, this is a film which evokes reading, interpretation and theorising. Is it, as colleague Hannah Collins convincingly suggested at our screening, all a dream (paying attention to the candy wrappers...)? Let's hope not. I'd prefer vivid fantasy, wherein the participants via their bravery, creativity and focus remake the world in their own image (a metaphor for art itself). There are no neat endings in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, because fundamental to Schoenbrun's filmmaking (which touches upon greedily believed internet hoaxes, obsessive TV fandom) is an innate dissatisfaction with the world, a palpable dislocation which is only assuaged by escape into the hypervivid stylings of simulacral realms.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 21st.
