Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a metatextual celebration of horror’s unique capability to confront and via cathartic release give comfort to its audience. Jane Schoenbrun’s psychosexual slasher is hilarious, camp, romantic, and gorgeously complex. Take the rule book of everything you’ve come to know about teen slashers and prepare for a bloody and beautiful deconstruction.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma marks the final entry in what Jane is calling their “Screen Trilogy.” Their debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, explored a teenager’s isolated experience with the internet, with echoes of gender dysphoria, loneliness, and digital addiction shaping its coming-of-age story. Their follow-up hit, I Saw the TV Glow, evolved that fascination from the computer screen to the television screen, telling the story of two characters grappling with their identities in very different ways. It was a striking and deeply moving film, using television as both haven and horror for the trans experience, or more broadly – anyone struggling to express who they truly are.
In what feels like a natural evolution in Schoenbrun’s filmography, they turn their gaze to the history, legacy, and complicated mythology of the cinema screen. In a marvellously detailed opening title sequence, the film traces the long history of the Camp Miasma films, a fictional slasher series not unlike Friday the 13th. This is an IP that has been milked for every sequel, prequel, and reinvention imaginable, pummelled by a studio that has progressively sent the series into over-saturated oblivion. Here we meet Kris (Hannah Einbinder), an up and coming indie filmmaker tasked with the difficult job of reimagining the franchise (“elevated… meaning woke”) for a modern audience.
Kris believes that getting in touch with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the final girl in the first Camp Miasma film, is the key to bringing her interpretation to fruition. Billy is a recluse in the Pacific Northwest who refused to return for any of the Miasma sequels and stopped acting. Presenting as not dissimilar to Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, she also lives among the remnants of her past, making a home for herself in the abandoned Camp Miasma filming site. The more the audience learn about Billy’s past, the more the film reveals its satirical edge, critiquing the horror industry’s capability to exploit women both within and beyond the frame.
Kris is in a polyamorous relationship with Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown), who is also dating “bi-sexual king” Thor (Aren Buchholz), but something about Kris’s love life feels out of sync. When Kris and Billy meet for the first time over a memorably sticky meal of KFC chicken wings, they have an instant connection. Although they come from different generations, their relationship quickly develops, thanks in no small part to the effortless chemistry between Einbinder and Anderson. During these quieter moments, insecurity, warmth, and sensuality are brilliantly encapsulated in their tender, layered performances. As the film continually shifts between romance, comedy, and horror, it gradually transforms into a fantasy where everything and nothing feels real.
Kris and Billy watch the original Camp Miasma together, which the audience gets to experience through a lovingly recreated pastiche of 80s slashers. Gillian Anderson conveys a profound sense of sadness and memory as she watches her younger self reflected back at her. In the footage, which features amusing turns from Zach Cherry and Eva Victor, the main showcase is the spear-wielding killer, aptly named Little Death (Jack Haven). A villain with an air vent for a head who serves as both a direct metaphor for orgasm and capitalist greed, Little Death also has a fascinating backstory, one that ties into Schoenburn’s anecdotal experience of being trans. Throughout these sequences, the over-the-top gore and soapy teen angst concurrently celebrate the medium while maturely poking fun at its conventions.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a deliciously dense and deconstructive work. It unpacks queerness and the intersections between identity and media, sexuality and misogyny, art and consumption, the male gaze and cinematic legacy, all while radically reimagining the tropes audiences have come to expect. When Kris pitches Billy as her lead in a cursed zoom meeting with studios executives – featuring well placed appearances from Dylan Baker, Sarah Sherman, Jess McLeod and Louise Weard – their airheaded responses, focused purely on profit margins, reflect an industry that increasingly prioritises brand expansion over artistic expression. The fact Jane was able to make a queer film of this creative calibre is deeply admirable.
With a dizzying amount of pastiche and homage that could not possibly be dissected in a single viewing: Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Sleepaway Camp, Psycho, Halloween, just to name a few other references – Schoenbrun still finds a way to assert their own distinct directorial voice. The film is painfully aware of horror’s historical punishment of women who engage in sexual expression, just as well as the queerphobia embedded within slasher’s roots. Jane chooses to recontextualise such horror, utilising satirical and meta-elements to place narrative power back into the hands of those who have historically been unable to control their own stories.
The production design by Matt Hyland and Brandon Tonner-Connolly amplifies Kris and Billy’s dreamlike fantasy. Colourful matte paintings fill every backdrop, while jokes about split diopter shots pay off in a gleefully funny fashion. Convenience stores are stocked with every type of flavoured gummy a sweet tooth could dream of. Shot on dreamy 35mm film, the cotton-candy colour palette envelops both the characters and the audience, revelling in a world that neither Kris, Billy, nor the audience want to leave. At one point, Jane’s clever screenplay even states, “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.”
As a transfemme non-binary director who grew up with screens as their sanctuary, Jane’s semi-autobiographical experience bleeds into the film. In one sequence, Kris admits that watching horror was not only a seminal experience in their upbringing, but also a defining part of their queer awakening. Hannah Einbeinder is magnetic in these moments, conveying equal parts trauma and vulnerability. The film walks a fine line between acknowledging the shame created by media’s unstable expectations of sexuality, while simultaneously reclaiming those ideas and finding confidence in your own desires. Jane has stated that a core tenet of the film is exploring sexual pleasure after transition, something the film amplifies in its gonzo, glorious, and genre-bending final act.
Under the provocative command of Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, who both deliver award-worthy performances, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma asks us all to claim our fantasies and welcome the little death. It is a triumph of genre filmmaking, proving once again that Jane Schoenbrun can put a fresh and heartfelt spin on even the most familiar tropes.
Funny, amorous, and endlessly evolving in style, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wholeheartedly revels in claiming your own identity, embracing a sexual awakening, and revelling in the euphoria that follows – it’s all about “flesh and fluids.”
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