Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Jane Schoenbrun’s most ambitious film yet: a painterly, uncomfortable collision of queer identity, horror fandom and sexualised violence. It is also so determined to explain its ideas that it can become less seductive than its subject matter.
Schoenbrun, the director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow, regularly excavates the media obsessions that shape people during adolescence. This film focuses on the uneasy meeting point between eros and thanatos, using an old slasher franchise as both an object of analysis and a source of fresh nightmares.
Camp Miasma centres on Kris Williams, played by Hacks star Hannah Einbinder. Kris is a queer independent-film favourite hired to remake an influential 1980s slasher. The studio is chasing fashionable elevated horror, while Kris wants to confront the franchise’s history of transphobia.
To understand the original films, Kris tracks down Billy Presley, portrayed by Gillian Anderson. Presley was the star of the first instalments but has withdrawn from public life, now living on the grounds where the movies were filmed. As Kris and Presley discuss filmmaking, desire and intimacy, the distinction between the production’s history and its fiction starts to dissolve. Before long, a killer rises from the lake.
The film’s central image comes from a single frame in the fictional slasher: the killer, Little Death, appears reflected in Presley’s wide eye during an orgasm. Kris wants to understand their complicated response to this piece of violent pornography. Presley, by contrast, is eager to turn that investigation into a ritual of her own.
A slasher that analyses itself
Camp Miasma tries to operate as both satire and example. It pokes fun at morally polished, pseudo-academic reappraisals of genre cinema while also making its own contribution to the tradition. Kris is an intensely wound-up figure who feels like a direct reflection of Schoenbrun: neurotic, articulate and perpetually explaining the film they want to make.
The dialogue frequently resembles an overextended Letterboxd review. References to Sunset Boulevard, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and posts about Sleepaway Camp are not left for viewers to discover; the film announces them itself. Its metaphors are plainly labelled, while moments that might have benefited from restraint are often buried beneath graphic violence.
Images stronger than explanations
The screenplay can be grating, but Schoenbrun’s direction is considerably more compelling. The filmmaker has a sharp eye for unusually specific imagery, and many of the film’s visual ideas linger even when its arguments become exhausting.
Camp Miasma is at its most effective when it stops defending its position and gives itself over to excess. A standout killing spree set to Counting Crows captures the decadent, psychosexual energy the rest of the film keeps attempting to define.
That imbalance is frustrating. Schoenbrun’s visual confidence suggests they could do remarkable work with another writer’s screenplay; their table reading of Secretary was said to have already produced promising results. Here, however, the film feels like a conversation held entirely with itself. That is an odd limitation for a story about forming a deeply personal relationship with notorious horror movies.
For fans of visual genre storytelling
Readers interested in the way cult media, horror imagery and screen culture overlap can explore more from RETROCADE’s arcade blog and arcade video collection. Those approaching the wider world of interactive genre entertainment may also find useful context in the arcade machine buying guide.
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