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***/**** starring Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
by Angelo Muredda “You talk about it so academically,” reclusive actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) chides filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) about her pitch to revive the slasher series the former anchored in her youth early on in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Rather than being about gender trouble, the pleasure principle, and whatever other high concepts the millennial theory kid Kris might bring to her meta reboot of the not-so-storied Camp Miasma franchise, the actual films, Billy insists, are about something concrete: “flesh and fluids.” Schoenbrun, a neurotic queer filmmaker with an abiding love for genre and a knack for mediating that love through smart metafictional narratives about trans and nonbinary identity, could certainly do worse for an authorial self-insert than Einbinder, whose sexually stunted, voraciously consuming (both movies and candy) Sundance wunderkind Kris is lovably guileless. But preemptively owning up to their own tendency to intellectualize the base pleasures of pulp art doesn’t fully take the sting out of Billy’s criticism, as far as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma itself is concerned. At once an agreeably campy horror-comedy, an arch portrait of the creative compromises of queer mid-budget filmmaking, and a subtextually ripe queer coming-of-age melodrama-cum-slasher about a fictional trans killer resolving an aloof artist’s hangups about sex and death, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is as baroque as its ostentatious title suggests. If it’s ultimately less than the sum of its parts, and not as emotionally gratifying as Schoenbrun’s previous two features, then at least there’s plenty of flesh and fluid behind its more inspired elements.
The third and final entry in Schoenbrun’s so-called “Screen Trilogy,” where characters “spend all day staring at a box that’s reflecting you back at yourself,” as the filmmaker told VARIETY of their We’re All Going to the World’s Fair protagonist’s self-fashioning through a steady intake of creepypasta videos, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the first to explicitly centre artists like themselves, who see the screen as a place to safely project their own developing subjectivity. We meet Kris fresh off the success of her cerebral festival darling Jouissance, a great gag title for their avatar’s film that speaks to Schoenbrun’s pivot from the mournful trans egg-crack allegory of I Saw the TV Glow to the joyful, orgasm-centred comedy of its follow-up. Kris has been opportunistically hired as the queer handmaiden for a woke reboot of the 1980s-originated series, a hybrid of Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp. Tasked with laundering the franchise’s transphobia by inventing a new origin story for the killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), an undead, spear-wielding maniac with an HVAC vent for a mask who started their reign of terror after being drowned by the other campers for dressing as a boy and a girl, Kris decides to visit the campground in the Pacific Northwest–namely, British Columbia, Anderson’s stomping grounds for the first few seasons of “The X Files”–where Camp Miasma was shot. That happens to be the present-day home of the now-retired eccentric Billy, whose onscreen presence so captivated Kris. The middle-aged Billy’s curious fascination with Little Death, who she speaks of in her alluring southern-fried accent as a real person living at the bottom of the lake outside her home (where “the movies come from”), inspires Kris to reconceptualize her reboot as a legacy sequel focused on the original star. The film comes together in her mind as the financing falls apart, and the women soon develop a romance rooted in their shared erotic attachment to the first Camp Miasma–their capacity for pleasure inextricably linked, they discover, to the moment when the camera assumed Little Death’s P.O.V. as they crept into Billy’s climactic sex scene, spear in tow.
If it seems complicated–academic, even–to tease out the implied psychosexual links between the perverted gaze of the slasher filmmaker’s camera on young female actors, the predatory gaze of the killer on the nubile teens they target, and the simultaneous gender dysphoria and awakened sex drive of queer cinephile spectators feeding their libidos for the first time, well, it is. It’s a credit to Schoenbrun’s light touch that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is ebullient despite the intricacies that might have weighed it down. In a callback of sorts to the crazed fan musings of “The Pink Opaque” acolytes Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Haven) in I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun sets the tone with a loving credit sequence that fleshes out the Camp Miasma lore, seeming to painstakingly recreate (while actually inventing) about forty years’ worth of lobby cards, posters, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, and home-video box art for the fictionalized franchise, which degraded into direct-to-video slop in the years before its revival. Schoenbrun brings the same homemade, tactile joy to the beat-up, lo-fi footage of the blood-soaked original Camp Miasma as they do to Kris’s hallucinatory arrival on the campgrounds, imagining her stepping into a watercolour painting from her subconscious memory of the film as she arrives. The most evocative of Schoenbrun’s stylistic flourishes is a sequence recreating Little Death’s killing spree at the camp from their own ecstatic perspective. The camera is yoked to the killer’s body as if in a sendup of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s experiential 1996 music video for The Smashing Pumpkins‘ “1979,” and their rampage is scored–bewilderingly, until one remembers that Schoebrun’s coming-of-age happened not in the prime of Camp Miasma but in the 1990s–to Counting Crows‘ melancholy piano ballad “A Long December.”
It’s a show-stopping, tonally complex, euphoric sequence, which, like most tantalizing camp, goes right up to the edge of bad taste without falling over. But the separateness of this set-piece from both the movie’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare-inspired narrative–slight enough that it can be put down for a five-minute musical number–and Kris’s sexual awakening via the scopophilic mechanics of the cinema, where she realizes she can get off to watching herself effectively get fucked to death, confirms Billy’s assessment that Kris, and by extension her directorial doppelgänger, may be overthinking things. Schoenbrun’s film comes vividly to life when it indulges in the aesthetics of pure, voracious nostalgia, straying from their more theoretical efforts to, as Kris tells the unconvinced Billy, “explore the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity.” Explore that intersection they do, and the decent execution of that goal is sure to land Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on many a horror cinema and gender-and-sexuality syllabus for years to come. Yet the film is less compelling as a hyper-theorized closing act to the Screen Trilogy than as the first entry in an upbeat, poptimist phase of Schoenbrun’s filmmaking, more at home with the music of Adam Duritz and Donna Lewis (whose earworm “I Love You Always Forever” plays over the breathlessly romantic closing moments) than with the musings of Jacques Lacan.
