TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA – Review by Diane Carson
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an imaginative, gory parody.
Credit writer/director Jane Schoenbrun for a truthful title for her Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. A sendup of slasher films that indulges that genre’s expectations in clever, albeit alternately gory and erotic ways, the story is quite simple. In deep snow, twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) makes a reverential visit to Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), living in an isolated cabin on a lake, deep in the Pacific Northwest’s forests. Obsessed with the Camp Miasma franchise since surreptitiously watching the 1980s original at the impressionable age of eight, Kris has set her sights on a Camp Miasma reboot, supported by money driven studio executives. Once her intrusion into Billy’s solitary retreat progresses, Kris must convince Billy to drop her previous, adamant refusal to appear in any of Miasma’s nine sequels and to once again embrace a starring role, a proposal Billy entertains.
The opening titles and the first scene establish the self-conscious tone and level of exaggerated violence, playfully mocking characteristics of the genre. Deep, labored breathing leads to a wrathful, murderous monster rushing in with his spear to slay film crew members amidst geysers of blood and Psycho inspired music. Allegedly, this terrifying, indestructible ghost, dubbed Little Death (Jack Haven), still haunts the area, residing in a hole at the bottom of the lake, ready, unpredictably, to defend his domain. The unique aspect of Little Death’s persona is his polymorphous identity, raised as, alternately, a boy and a girl, subsequently drowned by contemptuous, mocking campers. With a head of a geometric, metal helmet box, Little Death wears a white vinyl jumpsuit suggestive of a movie screen.
The essence and catalyst of the film is an explicitly provocative, on target commentary about the veiled appeal of iconic horror films expressed through their only slightly disguised sexual underpinnings complemented by a critique of restrictive sensual boundaries. In fact, Kris, in a problematic polyamorous relationship, lectures Billy about such productions’ unquestionable allure. As Kris proposes, they explore “the intersection of queerness and the cultural depiction of monstrosity.” Despite Billy’s objection to such an academic interpretation, Kris adds that her first effort, a remake of Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain, offers “a metacommentary on the gender trouble inherent in the slasher genre.” Her theoretical explanation will soon segue into several prolonged love scenes with Billy, each with added commentary by both women on the exquisite surrender to physical pleasure through the achievement of satisfying orgasms. In fact, Little Death is a term translated from the French “la petite mort” that refers to intense sexual pleasure as a brief moment of dying. The literal or metaphorical Little Death here will not have disappeared for long.
An inspired parody of the sexual subtexts of selected horror films, this one does not shy away from gory violence and buckets of blood alternating with erotically charged sexual indulgence. Adding further complexity, a welcome infusion of humor punctuates events. Even more thought-provoking and insightful, Schoenbrun interjects several scenes of Kris and sometimes Billy watching movies, implicating the current audience. And adding to its invitation for viewers to consider their complicity and enjoyment, Kris describes herself as “the watcher and the one being watched. I was the killer and the victim.” Everyone involved. On and off screen, makes a psychological and emotional investment, and Camp Miasma urges its acknowledgement. No spoilers, but the conclusion is formidable. The opening film in the 2026 Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard section, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma won the Queer Palm.
