‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Is a Horror Fan’s Hot Fever Dream

You guys all remember the Camp Miasma movies, right? That slasher-flick franchise from the 1980s, set in a summer camp in the woods — the kind of bucolic location that lets a lot of horny teens run wild and, if you’re a psychopath hellbent on revenge, makes for a perfect killing ground? The series’ resident slaughterer was named Little Death. In lieu of a hockey mask, they wore a large, square ceiling vent on their head. (It’s even weirder than it sounds.) Instead of a razor-tipped gloves or a bigger-than-average butcher knife, their weapon of choice was a double-tipped spear. Its hero was played by a young actor named Billy Preston, who found herself squaring off with Little Death onscreen in several sequels before the series inevitably went off the rails and began relocating its massacres to such exotic places as outer space and Manhattan.

These films aren’t real, though judging from the ephemera on display in the opening credits of Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, you might find yourself questioning that assertion. A lot of love and care is put into creating the marketing and merchandising of this fictional Friday the 13th-style franchise, and thus recreating the familiar pop debris of a past trash era. Touring what appears to be a Miasma museum, we whizz past a gallery of old videotape covers, posters, and newspaper clippings. There’s a Little Death action figure, a Camp Miasma arcade game, Halloween costumes and trading cards; we can only imagine how much that Little Death rap album would fetch on eBay now.

Then comes a montage of headlines that suggest the series had worn out its welcome, followed by accusations of the films being problematic as seen through a 21st century lens (that fact that the killer was a traumatized, gender-fluid teen certainly marks the series as transphobic). There’s eventually a backlash to the backlash, a revision-to-reappreciation arc, and a resurrection as nostalgiabait reboot fodder. Schoenbrun has given us the entire life cycle of an intellectual property in three minutes, a sneak preview of the affection, the brilliance, and the sense of obsession to come. They want you to laugh with them at these tie-ins and blogger posts. But they don’t want you to laugh at these old grindhouse nuggets that once haunted video store shelves, and continue to haunt many of our warped imaginations. Their movie demands that we admit these works not only made us who we are but colored our cinematic appetites — and possibly even left grubby fingerprints on our libidos.

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These particular slasher flicks definitely left a mark on Kris (Hacks‘ Hannah Einbinder), the young, queer, Sundance-annointed filmmaker who’s been hired to bring the “zombie I.P.” back to life. Her idea is to convince the films’ First Lady of Final Girl-dom to come back for one more chapter. Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), however, is living in seclusion in the rural outskirts of Portland, Oregon. Specifically, she’s holed up at Camp Tivoli, the abandoned getaway where they filmed the original Camp Miasma and where she’s been deep in her reclusive Norma Desmond phase for over a decade. Her agent (SNL‘s Sarah Sherman) thinks the slasher-flick royalty is good for a cameo. Kris wants her to be the requel’s anchor.

From the second that Billy appears to greet Kris in Tivoli’s makeshift screening room, swanning into the frame with a femme-fatale–friendly hat over her eyes and a Southern accent thicker than molasses in August, you can tell that the word “camp” is going to be pulling double duty here. Ditto the way Anderson makes a three-course meal of the phrase “dipping sauces,” a condiment that gets the same steamy treatment that strawberries did in 9 1/2 Weeks. Junk food is an aphrodisiac here, with KFC buckets and oodles of brightly colored brand-name candy acting as culinary counterparts to the junk cinema that’s activated something in the movie’s characters and its creator. Schoenbrun has talked about how the horror section of their local Blockbuster Video was like an orchard of forbidden fruit to them growing up, and the illicit thrill of indulging in things that might be “bad” for you permeates throughout Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Even the thesis-paper title spills into dangerous, hormonal territory.
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We do get to see an extended snippet of that O.G. Camp Miasma, dutifully recreated to look like a battered, faded print straight outta the Forty-Deuce during Reagan’s first term. Little Death (played by I Saw The TV Glow‘s Jack Haven) gets to display a facility with sharp objects and causing bodily harm that would make Jason Voorhees slow-clap. Severance‘s Zach Cherry and Sorry, Baby‘s Eva Victor are among the camp attendees-slash-inevitable victims. Purists will scoff at the way that most of the old-school cast is dispatched en masse instead the traditional one-kill-scene-at-a-time method. But only a true killjoy would not get a contact high from a massacre sequence anachronistically set to Counting Crows‘ “Long December” (it even matches Little Death’s initials), a needle drop pièce de résistance that times decapitations with Adam Duritz crooning “Hollywood.”

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Tributary moments are abound, from the obvious slasher shout-outs to The Shining and Videodrome. (Like I Saw the TV Glow, the filmmaker’s new film gives a lot of currency to the formative media of their youth; this time, however, the pulp slashers of the 1980s are subbed in for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer-type network programming of the 1990s.) But opening credits notwithstanding, Schoenbrun and their cast aren’t trying to fashion a wax museum with a pulse. It becomes apparent that Kris and Billy have formed a connection that goes beyond a possible professional collaboration, a simmering sexual undercurrent that’s helped by the fact that Einbinder and Anderson have a genuine chemistry onscreen. One of them has issues getting out of their head when it comes to experiencing le petite mort. Both of them have erotic fixations with that original Miasma, which requires stepping back into the movie — and the glories of the disreputable genre itself. Let’s just say that famous spear sequence from Friday the 13th gets reclaimed in a big way.

By the time our couple emerges bloody and blissful into the daylight, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has done more than stumped for guilty pleasures. It’s made a case that the two words deserve equal billing, and that by embracing the way guilt plays into your pleasures — especially the ones that come loaded with lots of psychological baggage — you can truly fly your freak flag at full mast. To paraphrase another possible influence: All that film watching isn’t healthy. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be freeing. Schoenbrun is a trans filmmaker, and you can feel how personal the notion of reconnection, identification, and liberation is for them in telling this tale. Yet the way they’ve artistically leveled up and used the moody aesthetic of the earlier works to craft a funny, unsettling, and ultimately emancipating work is exhilarating on all levels. It goes beyond being a paean to trash fandom, and transforms into something much deeper and grander. They have made their Miasma-sterpiece.