‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Review – Or,: How I Learned to Stop Analyzing and Love Junkfood Cinema

Some movies become part of you before you’re old enough to understand everything they’re carrying.

For me, one of those was James Bond. I still remember my dad introducing me to “Goldfinger,” and being transported watching Sean Connery deploy every little gadget on his Aston Martin DB5 before running off with Pussy Galore. I loved those movies long before I understood what “Pussy Galore” even meant, much less had the vocabulary to reckon with all the misogyny, sexual politics, and general baggage that came with them. Getting older and becoming aware of those things hasn’t made me stop loving Bond, nor has it erased the role those movies played in shaping my taste. You can’t really choose the art that gets its hooks into you when you’re young, and you can’t retroactively change what it meant to you once you understand the cultural baggage it carries.

So when the protagonist of Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” invokes James Bond while trying to examine the problematic movies she grew up loving, I immediately knew what Schoenbrun was getting at.

Gillian Anderson is a Strong Casting Choice

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a young queer filmmaker coming off a Sundance breakthrough—an appropriately pretentious reimagining of “Psycho” from the perspective of the shower curtain—when she’s hired to direct a new installment of “Camp Miasma,” a fictional, long-dormant ’80s slasher franchise built around horny campers and an iconic masked killer named Little Death. Kris grew up obsessed with the movies, which were also part of her queer awakening, even as she now recognizes them as misogynistic, transphobic, and, in her own words, “too problematic to reboot.”

Looking for a way into the material, she becomes fixated on Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the final girl from the original film who walked away from the franchise decades ago. Kris tracks Billy down to the abandoned campground where the movie was shot, and the two women descend into an increasingly strange psychosexual relationship as the boundaries between “Camp Miasma” and reality begin to disappear.

It’s immediately obvious that Kris is some kind of avatar for Schoenbrun. The very first time we see her, Einbinder appears onscreen alongside Jane Schoenbrun’s own directorial title card. Schoenbrun isn’t exactly being subtle about it. Nor should they be.

Cerebral and Deep, Yet Warm

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is like a piece of Halloween candy with a razor blade buried inside it: sweet, lush, horny, and almost obscenely inviting, but the deeper you bite, the more it cuts. Schoenbrun coats thorny ideas about art, desire, shame, and identity in enough sex, blood, movie stars, and Sour Patch Kids to give you a sugar rush.

What’s surprising is how light on its feet the movie remains while doing all of that. Schoenbrun’s previous films could be suffocating in their loneliness and melancholy; “Camp Miasma” is warmer, sweeter, and considerably more playful. It’s still deeply cerebral and eventually cuts just as deep, but Schoenbrun seems newly interested in pleasure—not merely interrogating it, but allowing their characters to actually have some.

Kris could use it. She’s blocked in seemingly every direction. Creatively, she can’t figure out how to make a “woke” “Camp Miasma” without alienating the people who actually like “Camp Miasma.” Socially, she’s awkward and anxious. Romantically, she seems perpetually stranded as the third wheel in an unsatisfying poly relationship. Sexually, she’s so terrified of embarrassment that gratification seems almost impossible. They’re different symptoms of the same problem: Kris has become extraordinarily good at intellectualizing her desires while building a prison that prevents her from actually pursuing them.

Capturing and Redefining the Essence of Slashers

Watching a wonderfully cheesy sex scene in the original “Camp Miasma,” she dutifully writes DESIRE in her notebook and underlines it.

That’s Kris. She can’t simply want something. She has to identify DESIRE.

And yet Schoenbrun keeps revealing the teenage movie nerd underneath the Sundance wunderkind patina. Kris stops at a gas station, grabs fistfuls of candy, flips through a rack of shitty DVDs, and lights up when she discovers an old “Camp Miasma” sequel. For all her ability to dissect the franchise’s politics and cultural legacy, her relationship with these movies precedes any of that analysis.

They got to her first.

Schoenbrun has a lot of fun inventing “Camp Miasma” as if it were a real slasher franchise, complete with vintage posters, merchandise, and increasingly ridiculous sequels. It’s basically their own “Friday the 13th:” a grubby piece of genre filmmaking that somehow became immortal, eventually sending Little Death on the inevitable trips to Manhattan and outer space. There are traces of “Sleepaway Camp” in its summer-camp setting and tortured gender politics, and something of the queer reclamation that eventually happened around “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2,” but mostly the joke is how instantly recognizable the entire life cycle feels.

The Movies that Made Us

Yesterday’s disposable junk has become today’s sacred intellectual property, and there’s an acid-tinged Hollywood satire in the decision to hand this supposedly embarrassing relic to an acclaimed young queer filmmaker and ask her to make it respectable. Kris already knows what’s wrong with “Camp Miasma.” The complication is that knowing doesn’t make her love it any less.

Which brings her to Billy.

There’s more than a little Norma Desmond in Billy Presley, along with the legacy-sequel echoes of Jamie Lee Curtis returning to “Halloween”—comparisons the movie itself is happy to invoke. Casting Gillian Anderson is particularly inspired because Schoenbrun gets to borrow decades of genre iconography without having to explain any of it. Anderson is both a tremendous actor and a genuine genre icon, and the movie lets her be funny, imperious, theatrical, incredibly sexy, and just threatening enough that you’re never entirely sure whether Kris should be listening to her.

Einbinder is Good Throughout

Opposite her, Einbinder gives a terrific first major film performance. Her comic instincts are obviously useful for Kris’s nervous, hyperverbal awkwardness, but she’s just as good at suggesting the panic underneath it—the sense that Kris is constantly monitoring herself from somewhere outside her own body. Both actors are playing women who have turned themselves into performances. Kris performs the socially conscious Serious Filmmaker; Billy performs the mysterious former scream queen. The longer they spend together, the harder it becomes for either performance to hold.

And somewhere along the way, this acid Hollywood satire starts morphing into a dreamlike stoner romantic comedy between the two of them.

That’s one of the great pleasures of “Camp Miasma.” It isn’t particularly interested in being scary in the way “I Saw the TV Glow” was, but it’s not exactly a spoof either. It’s a chamber piece between two women that somehow feels epic, oscillating between industry satire, erotic two-hander, ghost story, slasher movie, and romantic fantasy without ever feeling like Schoenbrun has lost the steering wheel.

And it’s horny. Extremely, wonderfully horny.

Sex and Character Development

More importantly, the horniness actually matters. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie with sex scenes this artfully executed that are also this dramatically consequential. Schoenbrun doesn’t use sex as decoration, provocation, or proof that we’re watching an “adult” movie. The sex is where Kris’s character develops.

She begins the movie sitting at a safe remove from desire, watching it on a screen and taking notes. With Billy, desire becomes something she has to participate in. Schoenbrun understands something a lot of contemporary American movies seem weirdly frightened of: a sex scene can reveal character through bodies rather than dialogue. Who looks, who performs, who relinquishes control, who allows themselves to be seen—all of it matters. Kris spends so much of the movie trying to control the frame, both as a director and as a person. Sex is where she discovers what happens when she gives some of that control up.

Billy’s answer to all Kris’s theorizing about what made “Camp Miasma” work is considerably simpler: “flesh and fluids.”

DESIRE.

Flesh and fluids.

Kris wants to put a name to the sensation. Billy wants her to experience it.

Is Trash Nourishment?

That distinction starts bleeding into everything. Kris lives off candy and movie snacks. She and Billy bond over fried chicken and dipping sauce. Sour Patch Kids practically become erotic objects. Food, movies, sex, and violence occupy the same sensual plane: sugary, greasy, artificial, excessive, potentially bad for you, and delicious anyway.

Maybe the trash is the nourishment.

It helps that “Camp Miasma” is gorgeous. For all the movie’s joking about the distinction between high art and trash, Schoenbrun has made an extraordinarily beautiful piece of filmmaking out of the cheapest, tackiest materials imaginable. At times it looks like Wes Anderson had a lifetime subscription to Fangoria: oversaturated skies, matte-painted backgrounds, candy-colored gore, artificial moonlight, bodies and blood rendered with almost obscene lushness. Schoenbrun isn’t trying to perfectly reproduce what an old slasher actually looked like so much as what one feels like in your memory after decades of VHS tapes, late-night television, and accumulated nostalgia.

Schoenbrun Commits to Her Premise

Their needle drops work the same way. One of the movie’s standout sequences pairs a “Camp Miasma” massacre with Counting Crows, an inspired collision of melancholy pop and geysers of blood that manages to be hilarious, beautiful, and genuinely stirring at the same time. The joke isn’t that the music is too sincere for the violence. Schoenbrun commits completely to both.

That’s the tonal trick they pull off throughout the movie. “Camp Miasma” can be sincere and ridiculous, erotic and grotesque, intellectually dense and tremendously silly without treating any one mode as a corrective to another. Its tone is elastic without ever becoming messy. Schoenbrun can find genuine eroticism in dipping sauce and beauty in a slasher massacre because they never seem embarrassed by any of it.

Gradually, neither is Kris.

The distinction between Camp Tivoli and “Camp Miasma” starts disappearing. VHS textures, matte paintings, and contemporary digital effects bleed together until asking what’s “real” becomes almost beside the point. Little Death supposedly waits at the bottom of the campground’s lake, inside a bizarre video store Billy describes as “where the movies come from.”

Schoenbrun Gives Her Protagonist Authorship

That image feels like the culmination of an obsession running through Schoenbrun’s entire filmography. Like “Videodrome,” their movies treat media as something that doesn’t stay safely on the other side of the screen. It gets inside you, changes your desires, and eventually starts erasing the boundary between the person watching and the thing being watched.

Across Schoenbrun’s three narrative features, their protagonists have moved progressively closer to that boundary:

Viewer. Fan. Director.

“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” follows someone participating in an online horror phenomenon she can’t fully understand. “I Saw the TV Glow” is about fandom so consuming that the television show on the other side of the screen may contain a truer version of the self. “Camp Miasma” gives its protagonist something neither of those characters possessed: authorship.

And that makes all the difference.

Playing in the Sandbox of Our Youth

Kris isn’t horrified when she finally finds herself inside the movie that has consumed so much of her life. She takes control of it. Suddenly “Camp Miasma” becomes a wonderfully adolescent form of wish fulfillment: she gets to spend time with the movie star she grew up crushing on, reshape the franchise around her own desires, and even unleash Little Death on the people making her miserable. What initially looks like another Schoenbrun story about disappearing into an obsession becomes a fantasy about claiming ownership of it.

The joke folds back in on itself. Kris gets to reshape the formative slasher of her youth while Schoenbrun is doing the same thing through Kris.

There’s no shortage of filmmakers who get to play in the sandbox of whatever nerdy obsession they had growing up. Contemporary Hollywood is practically built around it. What separates Schoenbrun is that they aren’t simply reproducing those obsessions or catering to an audience waiting to recognize the references. They metabolize them into something unmistakably their own. “Friday the 13th,” “Videodrome,” and the rest of the slasher canon are raw materials rather than the destination.

Eventually the Fluids Win

There’s still an amusing contradiction in making such an academic movie about the limitations of intellectualizing pleasure. At times, Schoenbrun can seem almost as incapable as Kris of simply letting the “flesh and fluids” rip. But “Camp Miasma” isn’t primarily interested in taking horror apart to show us how clever it is. It’s interested in whether we’ve spent so long explaining the ride that we’ve forgotten how it feels to be on it.

And eventually, the flesh and fluids win.

That may be the most exciting thing about “Camp Miasma.” After “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” Schoenbrun has made another film about the media that gets inside us and helps shape who we become, but this time they’ve approached that obsession with more pleasure, more confidence, and more freedom.

Three films would ordinarily feel too early to start making grand pronouncements about a filmmaker, but Schoenbrun has already developed such a specific cinematic language that I’m willing to make one anyway: they’re one of the best filmmakers currently working, and certainly one of the most vital.

An Essential Filmmaker

What’s exciting is that the specificity of their work has never made it feel limited or closed off. Schoenbrun is a trans filmmaker making intensely personal, expressive art about identity, desire, fandom, and the strange ways media embeds itself inside us, but the films don’t require you to share their exact experience in order to recognize yourself in them. They’re specific enough to feel lived-in and expansive enough to travel.

That’s what separates Schoenbrun from so many filmmakers who get handed the keys to the sandbox of whatever they obsessed over as kids. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” isn’t interested in proving how much Schoenbrun knows about slashers or flattering an audience for recognizing the references. The genre history gets absorbed, distorted, eroticized, joked about, and finally turned into something unmistakably theirs.

The result is sweet, horny, funny, strange, emotionally sharp, and completely singular.

At this point, Jane Schoenbrun doesn’t just feel like an exciting filmmaker to watch.

They feel essential.