Programme Notes: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

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Programme Notes: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

by Jessie Wilson, Glasgow Film Marketing and Press Coordinator

Please note: these notes contain character descriptions, plot details and SPOILERS, and are best read after viewing the film.

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire, if it was set during a Friday the 13th Sequel.” That’s Jane Schoenbrun’s elevator pitch for their latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It’s a solid pitch for a film (within a film, within a film…) that, rather than defies genre, embraces a whole bunch of them with such open-hearted enthusiasm that they become enmeshed. Boil it down to its most simple form and you get a winking pastiche of the slasher film. Described by Schoenbrun as a “toxic soup” of problematic tropes, contradictions and nostalgia, the genre is deconstructed and spilled back onto the screen in a glorious, gory, deeply personal celebration of both cinema and coming into one’s body.

After the major critical success of 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow — a haunting allegory on gender dysphoria and repression — Schoenbrun’s latest charges forth as an exhilarating, run-through-the-snow-in-your-pants liberation. It stars Hacks breakout star Hannah Einbinder as Kris, an up-and-coming director and Sundance darling (not unlike Schoenbrun themself), who, after the success of their debut film (a remake of Psycho ((Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)) from the perspective of the shower curtain) is tasked by Hollywood with creating a ‘woke’ reboot of the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise. Gillian Anderson is Billy Presley, a glamorous, Norma Desmond-esque recluse who starred in the original film and who Kris believes can inject life back into what she describes as “zombie IP”. Finally, we have Jack Haven (I Saw the TV Glow) as Little Death, Camp Miasma’s spear-wielding killer with a ceiling vent for a helmet, its concentric squares neatly echoing the interplaying layers of reality Schoenbrun folds into the film.

We know, from the opening credits’ painstakingly detailed tour of the fictional franchise that, following an initial cultural explosion, Camp Miasma became a tired, sequel-churning flop-fest. Where Friday the 13th (Dir. Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) had Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Dir. Rob Hedden 1989), Camp Miasma has its own late stage sojourn to the Big Apple. "If you keep the shitty horror franchise running long enough, eventually, they're probably gonna go to space,” Shoenbrun said in a recent interview. Schoenbrun’s influences are vast, and for every teen counsellor's head gleefully plonked off at the behest of Little Death’s spear, there’s a reference. Citing everything, from Sleepaway Camp (Dir. Robert Hitzick, 1983) to Secretary (Dir. Steven Shainberg, 2002), it’s clear this is a film made by someone enamoured by film. A real fan. Which is really what all of Schoenbrun’s movies are about. Both Schoenbrun’s feature films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow feature young teens who use screen media — an online role playing game and a 1980s Buffy-esque TV show, respectively — as ways to escape their own realities. In their latest feature, that escape takes the form of Camp Miasma.

This sense of disjointedness, of an existence spliced onto screens and fantasy overlapping reality, mirrors Schoenbrun’s own experience with gender dysphoria. Schoenbrun realised they were trans while writing We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and started transitioning after it. But where We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow dwell on alienation and suppression of identity, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma hurtles headlong into self-actualisation. Like Norman Bates in Psycho, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (Dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991), and Robert Elliott in Dressed to Kill (Dir. Brian De Palma, 1980), Little Death’s transgression of gender is directly linked to his villainous origin story: forever seeking revenge after being drowned in a lake by a group of teenagers. But rather than framing gender or sexual transgression purely as an act of violent deviance, the film positions Little Death as a symbol of sexual awakening. While watching the original Camp Miasma in her private theatre, Billy summons him, unleashing a bloody long-take massacre seen through a Michael Myers-esque POV and triumphantly set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December.” As Little Death begins to bleed into their reality, the grain of Billy’s old film gives way to sharp, present-day clarity. Later, Kris spends her final moments in Camp Tivoli’s Bunk 5 with Billy, watching herself die. As Little Death approaches, the camera shifts from the bunk to the interior of his helmet, with Kris’s first truly gratifying sexual experience occurring simultaneously with the impalement of both women.

Ultimately, Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma is a film about getting out of your head and into your body, and for Kris and Billy, Little Death is the key. Everything from his helmet (a ceiling vent is something usually only seen lying down), to their name, Little Death—c’est un orgasme, no?— is a projection of our protagonists’ own relationships with intimacy. Sex can be scary, and while Billy uses Little Death as a way of overcoming past trauma, Kris uses him as a way of connecting to herself. Like while watching a good horror film, fear is translated into excitement when you surrender to the screen—or to Little Death—and allow the lines between fantasy and reality to blur, just a little. So much of the film is about being in the mindset to really enjoy something scary, something that we’re constantly reminded of through Kris and Billy’s mutual obsession with junk food. Whether Kris is pouring chocolate into her popcorn while watching a trashy horror on DVD, or coming to terms with her sexuality, junk food acts as an emotional safety net. Speaking of desire, do you like dipping sauce?

Like Kris, who had “no business” watching the original Camp Miasma at eight years old, many of us will remember our first taste of horror: wide-eyed and transfixed in front of an older friend’s television. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a love letter to those movies — to the ones that stick. For all its exuberant camp and gore, the film retains that intangible dreamlike quality that haunted their earlier films. As Kris, for all her intellectualising at the beginning of the film, begins to mentally fracture, Schoenbrun expertly balances a Lynchian, creeping feeling of anxiety with copious, comic gore. Schoenbrun treats cinema itself as a kind of playground — “It’s all play,” is something Billy repeatedly tells Kris throughout — filling the film with little reminders that we’re watching something lovingly constructed. The world around the characters is deliberately artificial: backdrops look almost too fake to be real, visual jokes tip their hats to Cronenberg and Carpenter, the carpet in Billy’s theater feels plucked straight from a 1990s video store and the way her spotlight is captured by the projector in her private theatre is oddly reminiscent of Nicole Kidman’s iconic AMC advert—”somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has a whole lot of guts. Schoenbrun lays all their cards on the table — dealer’s choice. It’s up to the audience to decide what to pick up on. Like Kris, you could intellectualise and analyse forever, but perhaps it’s best simply to surrender. It’s only flesh and fluids.

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