Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma

Jane Schoenbrun, atmos-farming poet of modern indie horror, delves into their most formative influences with this metatextual slasher movie about a young film-maker working on a reboot of a 1980s classic, while developing a penetrating relationship with the reclusive star of the original.

There’s no doubt that Schoenbrun is taking a certain quantity of mickey out of this equally beloved and maligned sub-genre, but they also pay it the valuable compliment of executing it all with an artistic flourish it doesn’t usually receive. Rather than the films themselves, the real targets of their astute satire tend to be those who abuse them for their own nefarious ends: fundamentalist moral campaigners demanding we ban this sick filth and far-right keyboard warriors outraged by ‘woke’ interpretations of their favourite movies.

However, assuming that protagonist Kris is an onscreen avatar for the writer / director themself, Schoenbrun is keen to poke fun at their presumed allies on the progressive side of history. It speaks of a refreshing self-awareness that offsets any potential pomposity that might have undermined the film’s gentle messaging about queer identities.

Still, this playful humour never comes at the expense of the filmmaker’s primary goal, which is simply to make you think again about something you might feel you already know very well. They present a new perspective on an old subject, and understand the essential truth about cinema – it’s ALL about perspective. Besides which, and despite our civilisation’s intellectual race to the bottom, there’s nothing wrong with thinking.

Initially, cinematographer Eric Yue only hints at his director’s characteristic fondness for nebulous shades of deep purple at the edge of every shot, flushing them away with bright white light (either solar or wilfully artificial) until they retreat to the darkest corners of the screen like a temporarily vanquished foe.

Yue imprisons the characters in a complex array of light and shade which harks back to the chiaroscuro common to many films of the 1980s and 1990s, and which seems to have fallen out of fashion in mainstream Hollywood these days. The camera itself creeps up on the house, or on the couple inside, with a reticence that might signify decorousness or trepidation, like it’s an invisible third party whose own motivations provide as much mystery as the psychedelic, snow-drenched, pink-skied fairy tale forest where Gillian Anderson’s retired actress Billy Presley resides.

Many of the film’s techniques (axial cuts, whip-pans, tracking shots, time-straddling dissolves) are straight out of the horror playbook, but the central mystery is much more interesting because it’s so personal and emerges so completely from the heroine’s interior life, as opposed to an exterior threat. Under Schoenbrun’s delicate but precise touch, the psychological becomes physical.

Hannah Einbinder is an [pullthis id="engaging"]awkwardly engaging lead, her hapless everywoman driven but not consumed by a desire to honour her creative muse. She trudges half-blindly through the plot as if she’s her own ‘final girl’, her curiosity leading her down a dark road that doesn’t kill the cat but enlightens it.

She’s also a terrific foil for Gillian Anderson, whose much showier role is an intriguing cross between Norma Desmond, Blanche DuBois and Count Dracula. She lives in a topographical and psychological middle of nowhere, so remote from the rest of the world that it’s a wonder she has any social skills left. But we all go a little mad sometimes, and her madness, despite the insistence of the lingering camerawork and expressionistic sound design, might well be the sanest thing in the movie.

We’re granted lengthy sequences from the film-within-a-film, an affectionate knock-off of Friday The 13th (complete with Patrick Fischler’s delightful fan-pleasing take on Crazy Ralph), which contains numerous visual echoes of the main story, in what at first seems like a case of life imitating art. But as the plot stalks its way towards its resurgent conclusion, that case seems anything but clear-cut.

All this is two parts love letter to slasher movies, one part academic essay. But Schoenbrun’s game sense of humour about everything, up to and including their own precious artistic endeavour, binds these often conflicting impulses in a surprisingly happy marriage. When these two worlds gradually collide, editor Graham Mason starts doing unspeakable things to his Avid until we’re led up a garden path of exquisite, emotion-tickling abstraction that teases our erogenous zones one minute and dispatches us in a ridiculous geyser of gore the next.

Where other filmmakers disinter mouldy horror tropes merely to validate the movie nerd’s mindless devotion, Jane Schoenbrun has a lot more on their peculiar and visionary mind. They seek to interrogate these tropes, to test the limits of their capacity to appeal to a younger, more open-minded, more identity-conscious audience.

This may be a lofty goal, especially for a film as schematically (and accurately) titled as Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, but they have the knack of scoring it with considerable style, intellectual rigour and sheer cinematic imagination, and no true horror fan could argue with that. If We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow were flexes of the creative muscle, then Camp Miasma is a tour de force.

-Stew Mott-