Jane Schoenbrun’s first two features, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, explored the inextricable entanglements between our physical world and, respectively, digital and televisual spaces. How these sometimes ominous, sometimes bewitching spaces can serve as sanctuaries for the vulnerable is also a key theme of Schoenbrun’s third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which further probes and blurs the lines between individual lived experience and the media we consume.
The film’s extended opening montage recounts the rise and fall of the fictional 1980s slasher series Camp Miasma. Through a collage of trading cards, toys, newspaper articles, and magazine think pieces, we learn how, like so many horror series, this one went through a slew of creative transformations. The only constant is a killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), whose head resembles the lens and matte box of an old film camera.
What initially captivated and thrilled audiences was inevitably diluted thanks to soulless cash grabs. Specifically, with each subsequent entry, the decades-spanning series is criticized for its misogyny and transphobia, before dying an unceremonious death as its oversaturation and diminishing returns resulted even in its most rabid fans to lose interest in it.
Enter Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young, queer director tasked with reviving the series and giving it a “woke” makeover, so as to appeal to a younger generation. Kris’s strong connection to the first entry of the Camp Miasma series stems from the look in the eyes of that film’s star when Little Death plunges a spear into the boy who’s bringing the final girl to orgasm. As this scene happened to awaken Kris to her queerness, she hunts down the now reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) with the hopes of casting the former starlet as the lead in the reboot and discover what it was about Billy’s performance that moved Kris so deeply.
What follows is a beguiling and whimsically enigmatic (almost) two-hander that grows stranger from the second that Kris arrives at Billy’s remote home, which happens to be the location of the camp from the original Camp Miasma film. It’s here that the barriers between the world of the slasher series and the world at large begin to dissolve—the two intermingling in unsettling, unexpected, and funny ways that encapsulate the depths to which one’s connection to fictional realities can unalterably transform us and how we perceive our reality.
Where Billy, though admittedly lonely, finds solace in her seclusion, Kris is workaholic who sees sex and her polyamorous relationship as a “distraction,” leaving her uncomfortable in her own skin whenever conversation veers away from films, whether her own or those that influenced her. But Billy—the sensual, mysterious yet inviting Southern belle that she is—has an inexorable pull on Kris, and as the two grow closer, their relationship becomes increasingly complex and mystifying, just as Kris’s relationship does with the intruding world of Camp Miasma.
At this point, the visual language of Schoenbrun’s film becomes more and more surreal, drawing from the phantasmagoric dread of David Lynch, the squelchy body horror of David Cronenberg, and the homespun, kaleidoscopic artifice of Michel Gondry. But despite these trace influences, the endlessly playful, humorous, and mirthfully gory Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is pure Schoenbrun. The manner in which the filmmaker collapses and fold the fictional and real into one another is riveting, creating an alchemical blend of the achingly romantic, the cleverly absurdist, and the wondrously violent that feels truly unique.
As Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma delves into Kris’s sexual reawakening through her bond with Billy, it also threads in a tactile, thrilling meta-commentary on the slasher genre, incorporating footage from the original Camp Miasma film. The footage glimpsed is from a print belonging to Billy, but it feels like it’s being filtered through her and Kris’s memories and interpretations of the film. Also, Little Death—a not-so-subtle reference to orgasms—makes their presence felt both on screen as Kris and Billy watch Camp Miasma and, later, off screen as the two women interrogate their transmuting surroundings and feelings toward one another.
Early on, Kris discusses her love of Camp Miasma (and her ideas for her reboot) in highly academic terms, specifically its homophobia and transphobia. After talking with Billy, Kris comes to realize that it’s her sensual and emotional responses to the material that imbue it with its significance and staying power. The film is about “flesh and fluids,” Billy says, and, at its core, that’s what Schoenbrun’s film is about as well. Despite its title, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is less about sex and death than sex and cinema, and the transcendental connection between the two, primarily through their uncanny power to penetrate and forever transform us.
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