'Teenage Death and Sex at Camp Miasma' review: A bloody, bizarre reclamation of the slasher movie

Courtesy of Mubi

---

Easily the most high-profile trans filmmaker working today, Jane Schoenbrun uses their eclectic third feature, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” to spin an interesting yarn about longing, identity and the complicated relationship we develop with the art that helped shape us. They use the slasher genre as a conduit for translating a distinctly queer experience while taking aim at Hollywood and its attempts to commercialize that experience, particularly when studios discover that slapping a few contemporary buzzwords onto aging intellectual property is easier than reckoning with what that property actually represented in the first place.

The film takes some bold swings. Some are wonderfully inventive. Hearing Gillian Anderson offer someone a bucket of KFC before delivering an ASMR-style reading of “Do you like dipping sauce?” is something I never knew I needed. Others make the movie considerably more difficult to penetrate, boxing viewers into an intentionally isolated chamber and asking them to determine for themselves how, or even if, what Schoenbrun is exploring connects with them. That makes “Camp Miasma” a tricky movie to review because it is so intensely personal that your mileage is almost guaranteed to vary.

At its core, the movie is about longing, the desire to feel seen and heard and the strange emotional ownership we can develop over the things that helped us understand ourselves. At the same time, it satirizes a Hollywood increasingly fixated on resurrecting dormant IP for a quick buck, particularly when studios attempt to paper over a franchise’s problematic history by demonstrating how hip they are to changing times.

In this case, that franchise is “Camp Miasma,” a “Friday the 13th”-inspired slasher series in which a killer known as Little Death, who has an air vent for a head, stalks and murders camp counselors and unsuspecting teenagers. Like most long-running horror franchises, and as a crafty opening title sequence quickly establishes, “Miasma” has been beaten into the ground and is now on life support, leaving its corporate overlords desperate for a fresh voice who can inject some relevance back into it.

They find their next director in “Sundance wunderkind” Kris (Hannah Einbinder), whose first order of business is convincing Billy Presley (Anderson), the original final girl from the 1980s “Camp Miasma,” to reprise her role. The irony isn’t lost on Kris that she, a queer filmmaker, has been hired to reinvent a franchise built around Little Death (Jack Haven), a trans kid who was murdered. Yet rather than simply reject the material for its uglier history, Kris feels an unmistakable yearning toward it. “Camp Miasma” may not have always been good for her, but it was formative, and Schoenbrun is interested in the messy contradiction of loving something that never quite loved you back.

That brings Kris to Billy, who hasn’t acted in years and has instead retreated to the campsite where the original movie was filmed, living a secluded existence that only adds to her mythology. Anderson speaks mostly in hushed whispers through a heightened Southern accent, beefing up the movie’s campier tendencies while giving stares into the camera that could kill. There’s something immediately otherworldly about Billy, as though she has spent so much time haunted by “Camp Miasma” that the boundaries between herself, the character she played and the mythology surrounding both have completely dissolved.

It’s difficult not to see some of Schoenbrun in Kris, a filmmaker who similarly broke through at Sundance before using that opportunity to take increasingly ambitious swings. Kris’ relationship with “Camp Miasma” feels like an extension of the ideas Schoenbrun has explored throughout their work: the way movies and television can become safe spaces, prisons, mirrors and portals all at once, particularly for people searching for some reflection of themselves in a culture that has historically denied them one.

That wavelength echoes throughout “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” which increasingly stops existing within any recognizable reality. Schoenbrun is more interested in vibes, connections, styles and genre tropes than maintaining a conventional narrative framework. A large portion of the film is spent watching the movie within the movie, “Camp Miasma,” until its reality and Kris’ reality begin bleeding together. By the time a Counting Crows needle drop arrives, Schoenbrun has created the cinematic equivalent of a fever dream where nostalgia, trauma and desire become almost impossible to separate.

Though it functions more as a surreal drama than a traditional horror movie, there are bursts of cartoonish violence, absurd amounts of gore and plenty of slashings that keep the genre machinery humming underneath everything else. But Schoenbrun isn’t particularly interested in delivering a straightforward slasher. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” instead becomes a fever dream about who gets to control the stories that shaped us, who gets to reclaim them and what happens when Hollywood realizes there is money to be made from that reclamation. Its digs at the industry’s self-congratulatory approach to representation are hardly subtle, nor is its interrogation of the overwhelmingly heterosexual framework that has defined the slasher for decades.

It’s a vision worth exploring, even when I found myself admiring the ideas more than connecting with their execution. Schoenbrun’s increasingly surreal approach can make “Camp Miasma” feel deliberately insular, and there were stretches where I struggled to find an emotional entry point into what was being dissected. But perhaps some of that distance is inevitable for a movie so specifically concerned with the experience of seeing yourself, or failing to see yourself, reflected in the culture around you. I may not be entirely on Schoenbrun’s wavelength here, but I can appreciate the frequency they’re broadcasting on.

For all of its gore, camp and deliciously bizarre Gillian Anderson line readings, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” ultimately understands that nostalgia isn’t always about wanting to go back. Sometimes it’s about returning to the things that shaped you, recognizing the ways they failed you and deciding whether they can be reclaimed on your own terms. Schoenbrun doesn’t make that journey particularly accessible, but they do make it distinctly, defiantly their own.

Grade: B-

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is now playing in theaters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dimCiC_hdoA