Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the third feature from writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, and a continuation of their interest in the shaping of sexuality based on primary interactions with media. Schoenbrun’s debut, We're All Going to the World's Fair, showed a young girl’s obsession with completing a digital challenge as a destructive, all-consuming Internet habit that became an addiction and a gateway to the discovery of personal identity. Their previous film, I Saw The TV Glow, is among the greatest modern deconstructions of media as a helping hand and hindrance to social development. The film’s protagonist is offered a platform of self-expression through genre television, but his mistake is putting more value in the content itself, and not the community that he discovered as a result of it. While an obvious stand-in for Schoenbrun’s own reckoning with their non-binary orientation, I Saw The TV Glow is universally accessible as a story about the push-and-pull relationship with fandom.
Schoenbrun’s films, based on their melodic and esoteric composition, have attracted comparisons to the work of David Lynch. It’s not an entirely apt parallel because Schoenbrun’s features are easier than the ambiguity of Lynch’s body of work. Yet, Schoenbrun can conjure the feeling of dreaming in a way that doesn’t make the description of “Lynchian” feel completely off-base. Teenage Sex and Camp Miasma has a more specific relationship with dreams because of its interrogation of sexual fantasies, and it’s also Schoenbrun’s funniest film. In their sendup of slasher films from the 1980s and ‘90s, Schoenbrun’s willing to acknowledge what a ridiculous genre it was, and why reinventing it is a double-edged sword.
The trajectory that many talented filmmakers of Schoenbrun’s generation have gone through has industry attention after a breakout festival darling and immediately given the authority to revamp a classic property, with the hopes that their fresh perspective will revitalize a cynical enterprise. It’s a tricky line to walk, especially for LGBTQ filmmakers like Schoenbrun; in an entertainment ecosystem obsessed with intellectual property, being attached to an established brand might be the only way to ensure that their perspective is expressed on a significant scale.
This conversation isn’t just the subtext of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but the navigating idea. The film’s about the 29-year-old queer filmmaker Kris (Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder), who reboots the Camp Miasma franchise after the studio is impressed by her breakthrough Sundance feature. Camp Miasma was once ranked alongside Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but its value was depleted by low-quality sequels and intensified scrutiny about its “problematic” themes. Kris always saw Camp Miasma as a gateway to her queer discovery, and is enamored with the actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who played the original “final girl” in the series.
Kris is invited to meet Billy at a remote getaway in the middle of the woods, which is gradually transformed into a summer camp environment lifted directly from the original Camp Miasma. The degree to which there is any supernatural content involved is, much like in Schoenbrun’s previous films, ambiguous. Rewatching Camp Miasma for the umpteenth time has a deeper significance for Kris because of the context explained to her by Billy, whose experiences on the original set were traumatic. Billy’s concern is that she became so detached from her role as an actress that she came to identify with the character of Little Death (played by I Saw The TV Glow star Jack Traven), the ghostly slasher villain in the Camp Miasma franchise. It’s through the eyes of the voyeuristic, third-person perspective of Little Death (whose mask is modeled to look like a camera) that both Billy and Kris reclaim the events of Camp Miasma as part of an elaborate sexual fantasy used to reach their first orgasms.
It’s a bizarre and convoluted premise that makes sense for anyone with an understanding of the history of slasher films. The continuities were often rewritten and retconned with each subsequent film; Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees have died, gone to hell, been resurrected and starred in disastrously feckless reboots. They’ve become so divorced from the original intentions that it’s possible to ascribe any number of meanings to what these films represented, which is why Kris and Billy come at the Camp Miasma series from different perspectives. Billy’s initially skeptical about Kris’ “woke” interpretation because it’s completely textual, meaning that those who invest in it don’t have to cope with the “warts and all” aspects of a low-budget B-movie. At the same time, Kris is at risk of being let down by Billy as a person because she can’t simultaneously be an individual and a “scream queen” idol.
Being trapped within a nightmare of cinematic nostalgia isn’t a new concept, but Schoenbrun is smart enough to note her influences; there are specific references to Sunset Blvd. and a sly casting of Patrick Fischler, the character actor best known for his memorable appearance in the “diner scene” in Mulholland Drive. While the characters are open about their queerness and sexual desires might indicate a more optimistic, prideful spirit than the melancholy vibes of I Saw The TV Glow, it does result in a more surface-level film in which the answers don’t need to be worked for.
The irony of any critique of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is that Schoenbrun has fueled their experiences as a writer-director through the character of Kris, and any flaws within the film can be seen as representative of the protagonist’s ingenuousness. The most glaring flaw in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is only a backhanded insult, which is that Schoenbrun is too good of a visual stylist to appropriately represent the trashy subgenre of slashers. When the film’s reality is collapsed into a dreamscape inspired by the Camp Miasma sequels, Schoenbrun’s direction is far more visceral and eye-popping than anything that would’ve been seen in the Sleepaway Camp or Prom Night sequels.
If Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the least successful of Schoenbrun’s films, it’s also welcome that a work so self-reflective and original is what they chose to make after gaining more resources. The most apt comparison might be to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, a meta-sequel to the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise where the original creator returned the series to its roots by breaking the fourth wall. Schoenbrun’s intentionality is similar; Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a pastiche of an invented mythology, with the revelation that most nostalgia is based in self-projection.