Camp Miasma Is More Theory-Head Satire Than Horror
The new slasher film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma promises “a frenzy of psychosexual mania.” What director Jane Schoenbrun delivers is tamer but considerably funnier.
Jane Schoenbrun keeps getting bigger budgets and wider releases and keeps proving they deserve them. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the third piece of evidence. (Mubi)
For those in the know, cinematically, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an event film, though a small, arty one defying the odds by getting a mainstream release. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun had a cult-film phenomenon with their last horror film, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), and their next horror outing was keenly anticipated by those who seek out adventurous new auteurs. I could tell by the youthful audience attending the first wide-release screening with me — all a little unusual and, with the exception of one Goth couple, sitting strictly alone — that we’d all heard the jungle drums announcing an offbeat, must-see release. I was by far the oldest person there.
Brilliantly cast, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma stars Hannah Einbinder, stand-up comedian and star of Hacks, as Kris Williams, a nerdy, academically trained writer-director who’s been hired to reboot a moribund slasher film franchise that got its popular start back in the 1980s under the title Camp Miasma. As part of her research and intense fandom, she seeks out the reclusive star of the first Camp Miasma film, Billy Presley, played by Gillian Anderson, movie goddess and former lead in the beloved 1990s series The X-Files. Together at Billy’s wintry home in the mountains where that first low-budget Camp Miasma gore fest was set and shot, Kris and Billy begin a collaboration on the rebooted franchise film by exploring the meaning and impact of the Camp Miasma films through their own increasingly intimate and erotically charged relationship.
Jouissance and the Final Girl
Kris is very much inclined to intellectualize and deploy grad-school terminology in her initial meeting with the languid and mysterious Billy Presley, automatically throwing out Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of “jouissance” and Carol Clover’s film studies argument about the slasher film genre’s Final Girl character. While watching the first Camp Miasma film together, screened in Billy’s own unlikely movie house in the woods, Kris also has a knee-jerk tendency to announce “That’s the transphobic part” at the start of the scene when the camp counselor (Zach Cherry) describes to the teenage campers the backstory of the undead slasher-killer Little Death (Jack Haven), who was raised by two luridly disturbed hermaphrodite parents to be “a different gender every day.”
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.