‘Are you still watching?’ A review of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
by Aksharaa Agarwal
If you’re reading this, you’ve been involved; to review Jane Schoenbrun’s latest is to enter the canon of its making. Operating in a space of expressive inward abstraction, media obsession and queer becoming, Schoenbrun has established themself as an unpredictably intriguing filmmaker. With Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the allure is a well-worn one: that same compulsion that once drew tentative fingers to slip a sleek pulpy VHS spine off the shelf at the local video rental, promising the delightful challenge of terrors undiscovered (even better if restricted), is recharged. It emerges readily from within. Dressed in its blood soaked, familiar garb is the beloved Gillian Anderson, accompanied by the disarmingly charming Hannah Einbinder, in that perfectly stirring image of the central characters coolly walking away from disaster. Diagnosis: nostalgic. Go on, have a dose.
Opening on a disjointed point of view, a camera crew preparing outdoors cuts to a couple in wide, walking through the woods in the nighttime. A figure in a boxy mask wielding a spear charge at them. A swipe, a scream, and a fount springs tall and glistening, bright, almost like prom punch. Besides being a concise summary of the subgenre’s core elements, it’s all cheese, and it wants you to make note of that. Why so serious? Just lay back and have fun.
Following that, a comprehensive opening sequence steadily eliminates all the broad referential possibilities, running the gamut from arcade games to reboot-equels, and tracking the descent from blockbuster to cult status. The obsession with physical media associated with generational sentimentality is a popular new materialistic fetish. The type of eye-candy to make them glaze over, it’s almost target practice, a classic victim kill-list. The sequence is almost a parallel to the murderous rampage typical of the subgenre. Camp Miasma is at once a mystery, and that film we’ve seen so many times before.
With this teetering through line of the simulation of a memory established, Schoenbrun mounts the ultimate self-insert fantasy: the final girl of the sleepover slasher, catalyst to many a queer awakening, coaching y/n into climaxing (the iconic killer from the fictional Camp Miasma franchise is literally called ‘Little Death‘). Einbinder’s Kris is increasingly a placeholder, first for the Generic Protagonist, then for the Watchers (that’s us), and finally, for the Maker, Jane. The more autobiographical it gets, the further it descends into surrealisms, yielding stylized DIY images that exhaust the graphic-intrusive-thought possibilities of the slasher (short of breaking the fourth wall and directly raising the question, ‘you’ve thought about it too, haven’t you?’) When carnage is what it takes to be turned on, what does it take to…see it through?
A check on the sleepover staple box, the recluse is revealed to be a stoner, a detail which serves as a conduit for the crooked abstractions to be postulated. Much of the plot and its departure from logic is spurred on the strong plumes of this disorienting capacity. It’s the kind of circumstance in which perspective can switch bodies, gore can be enjoyed with candy, and distinct character types can become each other’s confusing double.
Unfortunately, the apprehensions that shackle Kris to their restraint are the same ones that withhold this iteration (Teenage Sex and Death, not one of the fictional Camp Miasma titles) from realising itself. Any sense of structure is abandoned fairly quickly, which is momentarily exciting (the possibilities of the unknown). However, as Kris postulates her concerns in no uncertain, and highly conceptual terms, it’s difficult not to hear the film we’re watching being described in real time (to say nothing of the many applicable meanings of the name Miasma). How to catch the slasher up to the present moment without making it self-aware? Or worse, self-referential? There’s also the third, stranger thing to be done- flip the script (literally) on what’s real.
As Kris and Anderson’s Billy Preston talk and talk about Camp Miasma, an already tenuous fiction begins to weaken. At the same time, Kris’s personal investments begin to detract from the film’s initial ones, the divide between these new ones and the ones advertised to the audience, widening. Teenage Sex and Death turns out to be about something else entirely, an overlap it doesn’t introduce so much as it inserts into the narrative. In fits and starts, through disparate transformations, it tries to work its way to the end. As tracks are switched, meaning evaporates, and a complex metaphor for the violent loss of innocence dissolves into a gimmick. In a moment of shock and confession, Kris is supposed to be losing their inhibitions. However, the closer they get to a difficult sincerity, it seems, the more performative their efforts, their entanglements, appear.
Caricatures of people the filmmaker is sure to have encountered in real life- the overbearing and tokenistic studio executives and reps, potential partners to whom one usually acquiesces, superstitious small-town folk- make for the hollow window-dressing of this emptied vessel. Any comedy derived from these stick-figures sharply undercuts the element of terror or delight crucial to maintaining the slasher mood, as do the visual gags. To the unimaginative or unaccustomed though, it’s easy to see how all this would seem supremely bold and sweepingly impressive.
Overall, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is vastly enjoyable- it contains several elements designed to be enjoyed, and certainly a personal achievement for Schoenbrun. The design is remarkable, each frame a postmodern painting. The freedom of the camera is celebrated, its ability to prescribe perspective put to intriguing use. The tone is clear. Its strength is in the way it manufactures a myth, with the side effect being the reveal of exactly how a myth is made, thus dissolving it. Gillian Anderson’s southern drawl is magnetic, well suited to the shifty dominance, artistic sensibility, and robes and turbans of the forgotten eccentric. Hannah Einbinder fully inhabits the shakiness that seamlessly gives way to curious empowerment. There’s even referential IYKYK nuggets sprinkled in. Surprisingly for a slasher/horror, it’s sure to leave you with the munchies. The verdict is in: this one’s for the capital ‘F’ Freakhouses. Ah, a private, alternate reality. Just be careful though…it might be watching you back.