Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta narrative on slasher films, queerness, the media that shapes us, and desire.
Lots of movies about specific interests are often referred to as "love letters to [blank]" — so much so that it's a bit of a cliché, at this point. But Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by Jane Schoenbrun of I Saw The TV Glow, truly is a love letter to slasher films. In telling the story of young director Kris (Hannah Einbender of Hacks), who gets the extraordinary opportunity to revive the classic horror franchise that she grew up with, Schoenbrun creates their own new slasher world, complete with lived-in world building and mythology.
The film itself is full of painted vistas, dreamy sets, movies-within-movies, and absolutely insane needle drops. But despite all this, it's the cinematic equivalent to inside baseball. There is a lot going on in the film, and fans of Schoenbrun's work will most likely revel in the weird, glorious, and twisted world they created. For folks who are into horror but in a more casual way, they may walk out confused. To be fair, it's confusing. A24 passed on it, if that tells you anything. There's an entirely different analysis that could be done from the trans perspective, but I'll leave that reading to others who can speak to it more meaningfully.
The heart of the film revolves around two main relationships: Kris and Billy Presley (played by Gillian Anderson in her best Southern Gothic Norma Desmond) as they spend a wild weekend exploring the possibility of a reboot, and Kris & Billy and Little Death, the recurring villain the series.
First, Gillian Anderson's final girl-all-grown-up performance is absolutely the stuff of dreams, and maybe one of the strongest parts. Presley inhabits the abandoned summer camp where the first movie was shot, having become the classic ex-Hollywood recluse archetype. When Kris arrives, she's greeted with classic Southern hospitality: two buckets worth of Kentucky Fried Chicken (complete with dipping sauces) and copious amounts of weed.
Kris and Billy are attracted to each other, and shortly after meeting hook up. Kris grows frustrated, declaring herself "bad at sex." Billy is empathetic and doesn't pressure her to continue. She admits that she too has had trouble with coitus, and has relied on imagining Little Death watching her have sex. Kris, we learn, that despite her status as a queer feminist filmmaker, frequently fantasizes about being a sexualized final girl. She admits that as a young child (perhaps too young to be exposed, in fact) she obsessively watched the Little Death franchise, and this fantasy became embedded in her psyche.
For many people, media shapes us in ways that go beyond just taste — including the ones kept secret from everyone else. Horror and sex have always been intertwined, for a multitude of reasons: teenagers are drawn to it. The line between fear and desire is razor thin — titillation goes both ways. Horror films have often been also used as morality plays, where the "horny" teens get their comeuppance by way of brutal stabbing. Then there's the homosexual subtext in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a movie so gay that Freddy Krueger himself becomes the metaphor of being gay for a young teen, an intense self-loathing that permeates the film. Movies like Sleepaway Camp added to the gender dialogue, though that film has been hotly debated in recent years by queer scholars as to what it's really trying to say.
Much of the film revolves around these two characters simply talking and eating, and Schoenbrun in an interview with The New York Times described it as being influenced by My Dinner With Andre, the 1981 character study where the leads dine at Cafe Des Artistes and simply chat about life. The fried chicken, and then the candy that's every where — these all speak to the joy and comfort we get from pleasures of the flesh.
It reminds me of the novel Cranford, where the strict Victorian women must retreat to the solitude of their own room to enjoy oranges. When my English professor back in 2003 mentioned that this was absolutely a metaphor for sexual desire, I was floored. And yet, here we are, 175 years later, and we're able to witness the exact opposite of such prudishness. We get not only the metaphor — there are literally gummy bear and Sour Patch Kid chandeliers — but also later, two women having sex on screen. In another era, the simple fact of the main characters being gay would have doomed them to certain death by the villain. The very opposite happens, however.
They are thus connected together in their respective sexual proclivities that revolve around the fictional monster. Naming him "Little Death" is a little too on the nose for me, but one can see where it could be clever. The movie's end then gets meta as they insert themselves into the world of the film, and that's where I stopped understanding what exactly was happening. But that's okay! I admittedly came for the vibes, and I stayed for the vibes.
When it comes to meta-textual films, I think there's a very thin line you have to tow: Staying part of the "new" plot while not crossing streams too often. Self-aware media has existed for a long time (Hamlet, anyone?) but recent films have had varying degrees of success. Adaptation, for one, but also Scream, Being John Malkovitch...the list is surprisingly longer than you'd expect. Personally, I'm not the hugest fan, as I mentioned before I think there's such a thing as being too clever. It can quickly obfuscate nearly everything else about the film, especially the acting and the story.
For Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I didn't worry about the meta-ness of it all. Sometimes, you don't have to understand every single beat of a movie to enjoy it. When the characters didn't die at the end of the run time, I just shrugged and said, "Great!" It was enough for me to live in this odd world for a little while. The mythology of Little Death is so well choreographed that it felt like home. The opening sequence uses that classic exposition trick of overlaying the titles with a 30-year history of the franchise via newspaper articles. This old trick is up there with the Indiana Jones airplane-travel-red-line-on-a-map trick, and I'm a huge fan. By the time the movie starts, you have a really good grasp of this lived-in franchise and its ups and downs over the years. As someone who wishes there were more classic slasher villains in the world, getting this fake one is actually really fun.
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Highlights:
- Gillian Anderson eating fried chicken.
- Classic homages to Sleepaway Camp, Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Friday the 13th, and countless other horror films.
- The Counting Crows needle drop being used in a scene Adam Duritz could never have imagined when writing this sad ballad.
- Great supporting cast in Eva Victor and Zach Cherry
- Like many good horror films, it has hilarious moments to break the tension
Rating: 7/10
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.
