Fear and desire make an explosive cocktail in Jane Schoenbrun’s instant midnight-movie classic, a psychedelic tribute to the slasher-horror cycle of the early ’80s that subversively reclaims the genre from the traditional male gaze. It’s clear from the outset where Schoenbrun is headed, creating a mash-up of the better-known canon — Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street (in order of appearance) — but the added twist is the inclusion of 1983’s Sleepaway Camp, which ends with a transgressive twist that still somehow divides LGBTQ+ film critics, despite its obvious transphobia.
The title alone — Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma — does most of the heavy lifting, being the most glorious since Kathy Acker’s 1984 novel Blood and Guts in High School. It also fairly describes the majority of the film’s preoccupations — also including comfort food, which comes in the form of KFC, Jolly Rancher gummies, KitKats and more. In its aesthetic alone, the film will hit the spot for those who fell under the spell of horror movies while far too young to see them in cinemas. Movies like Wes Craven’s brutal 1972 shocker Last House on the Left, with its unforgettable tagline: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie… Only a movie… Only a movie…”
Schoenbrun’s film speaks directly to that nostalgie du sang, and in the genius opening credits it charts the ups and downs of the original Camp Miasma franchise. The first film — in which teen camp counsellors were picked off by Little Death, a psychopath with an air-vent for a head — was a hit, much like the first Friday the 13th movie. After that, its young star, Billy Presley, walked away and became a recluse (parallels are drawn with Shelley Duvall). The series continued, with diminishing returns artistically — look out for ludicrous medieval, Christmas and space-set variations — but, of course, plenty of opportunity for merch, as witnessed by T-shirts, figurines, and arcade games.
After the credits roll, the film finds film director Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a non-binary, polyamorous Sundance wunderkind, being tasked with rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. Kris has political reasons for doing this, since they know they are being exploited by the studio to give the project a veneer of PC credibility. But Kris is also a classic Schoenbrun heroine, an outsider whose lifeline is pop culture, and despite her apparent militance, she is not entirely at home in her sexual identity, as evidenced by her clearly unhappy relationship with a woman she shares with a bisexual man named Thor.
Kris wants Billy (Gillian Anderson) to make a cameo appearance in her film and so makes an appointment to visit her. She finds Billy living in the strangest place — an eerily deserted former campsite called Camp Tivoli that served as the actual location for the first Camp Miasma film. It even has its own cinema, which is where Billy makes her dramatic first appearance. “I saw you and I wanted to scare you,” she explains. With her Southern drawl and vampiric need for attention, Billy knocks Kris sideways, teasing her by pretending to be “bugs-under-the-skin crazy-lady” who thinks Little Death is real.
Schoenbrun, in contrast to both their previous films, plays this set-up largely straight and almost like a normal movie. It’s only when the two women sit down to watch Billy’s print of the first Camp Miasma that things start to happen. Schoenbrun creates an elaborate network of looks and glances here, with Kris being pulled into a film she’s seen a hundred times and now seeing it with a fresh eye and strange new feelings about the impact it has always had on her — sensations that can’t quite be pinpointed, or not yet.
At that point, Billy seemingly summons Little Death from his resting place at the bottom of the lake, and all bets are now off. Kris begins to freestyle about the direction her reboot is going to take, taking part in a disastrous Zoom meeting that horrifies the creative team that has been assembled to help her.
As reality and fantasy merge, admirers of David Lynch and David Cronenberg will be better equipped to read between the lines here, in terms of what’s happening to Kris and the sexual awakening she’s been repressing for years. Led by Billy, who learned the hard way back in the ’80s, Kris has to ask herself if she has what it takes to be the Final Girl, the blood-soaked protagonist who survives all those carving knives and chainsaws. It’s a tough act to pull off, but Einbinder does it, with the strength and vulnerability that is necessary to make this trippy, gory and still somehow perversely romantic love story its beating, bloody heart.
Title: Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Director/screenwriter: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Patrick Fischler, Eva Victor, Dylan Baker
Distributor: Mubi
Running time: 1 hr 46 mins
