Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has found and defined a very specific lane in contemporary cinema, digging deep into the way that identities develop, especially alongside genre conventions. They’re making horror films that deal with horrors of the body and mind, and the schism between the two. I Saw the TV Glow in 2024 was a remarkable work of empathy — wrangling dysphoria and nostalgia together into an enigmatic mystery that allowed anyone paralyzed by past regret to understand today’s persecuted perspectives. And their debut, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, is one of those films that sticks in your brain forever, a microbudget masterpiece that helped define the voice and vision of today’s liminal horrors.
But Camp Miasma is a different kind of liminal space; a shared conspiracy between archetype and memory. It’s the way that Crystal Lake and Haddonfield, Ill., and Springwood (which is both California and Ohio) offer a fixed place for our memories to unfurl in — where you had sleepovers and what you did there and what you watched all sort of coalesce in the mind’s eye. Nothing is an exact fit, because canon is — like the synapses in the brains of those who watch and those who remember — loosey-goosey. The films that Schoenbrun’s new Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma harkens to are places to be horny, and terrified. Places where the big moments that don’t pertain to bills and being responsible adults hold sway, and the freedom that comes from disrespectability. It’s why these films depict and market to teens with symphonies of hormones and blood.
“Why is it,” I can hear the voices asking, boomers and Gen Z in alignment, “that this particular age of the slasher film, from the end of the ’70s through the mid-’80s, holds so much power over so many people?” Horny terror is one of those fusions that has always been with us, but there was something about the trap door from the Disco Era into Reaganomics that made it imprint with some extra oomph. (Personal theory: The heightened fear of nuclear annihilation, which was both comprehensive and strangely impersonal, made the hands-on mayhem of the slasher into something more meaningful — artisanal, even. Nuclear apocalypse did not offer enough time for one last little bang.)
In the world of this film, the Camp Miasma franchise — as the witty and expansive opening credits show us — is several decades of dark imagination. We get a feel for its world and tendril-like sequels through VHS boxes, video games, action figures, posters and all the ephemera that keeps a work of art alive in the modern consciousness. Trends like 3D, going into space, changing locations, grimdark reboots and sloughing off continuity to return to elusive basics — they’re all part of what we see before we meet Kris, a young queer filmmaker famous (and infamous) for a remake of Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain.
As played by Hacks’ beloved Hannah Einbinder, Kris is very aware of what she represents: queer representation meant to manufacture queer representation for a big media company during that brief period of time when the culture sought out diversity both as a way of strengthening outreach and representation but also as an unspoken atonement for decades of racism, sexism, homophobia and whatever other transgressions seemed perfectly accessible and marketable at the time. She’s aware of all this, and sensing an opportunity, she’s aiming to bring back to the series its original final girl, Billy.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Billy (now played by Gillian Anderson, with a Norma Desmond turban and a bit of her Blanche DuBois) left the industry years ago and is holed up in the old sleepaway camp where they shot the first Camp Miasma back in the ’80s. It’s an isolated but sumptuous life, surrounded by memorabilia and vast chambers and overstuffed cushions and a nice screening room, but also a lake that may hold the actual resting place of the franchise’s masked killer Little Death (Jack Haven, in a remarkable wordless performance).
That’s the problem, you see. Because Little Death is fictional. But when something spends four-plus decades popping in and out of the collective consciousness, playing supporting roles in all manner of nightmares, fantasies, cosplays and cultural trappings … well, isn’t that reality?
As Kris and Billy get to know each other, both personally and aesthetically, there’s something happening. Schoenbrun has described this film as Portrait of a Lady on Fire during a Friday the 13th sequel — and damned if they didn’t get that exactly right. Is it possible to build empathy and liberation on a foundation of blood and guts and snow and lake? Schoenbrun very much seems to think so, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — in addition to being the best film I’ve seen so far this year — may be the most humane film about sexual awakenings in ages.
But beyond that, this is a horror film, specifically a slasher, that delights in the accoutrements of the genre. Junk food, boozy swill, dipping sauces of all sorts, purloined beers, convenience store racks’ worth of candies and snacks (seriously, so many racks of candy get stacked you feel like Juicy J should have written a song about it — like Gremlins, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Bros or The Stuff, this is one of those films that really understands what candy represents), sweaty backs, the bowling alley gutter guards that are diaphanous clouds of skunk weed and full-tilt pheromones, and gushing torrents of viscera.
I don’t know Jane Schoenbrun, but I can see them working diligently to make this a rewarding and captivating experience regardless of what level you want to experience it on. Grad students and gorehounds and theorists and bad babysitters and tweens who think they’ve seen everything previous generations have to offer. All in awe of this libidinous and luxurious journey deep into the subconscious, giving rise to something for an unforeseen future.
