‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ explores power, influence of pop culture consumption

Mubi

KMUW’s Fletcher Powell says a new movie shows its creator is becoming impossible to ignore.

With now three features under their belt, director Jane Schoenbrun is showing an uncanny ability to express the power and influence our consumption of pop culture can have on our development as people. It’s not the same as indulging in nostalgia, although nostalgia is some part of this. But it’s a recognition that what we take in, and the things we love as we’re growing into who we are, are impossible to disentangle from our own identities.

Their newest arrives with the delightful name of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and we learn through a series of newspaper headlines during the opening credits that Camp Miasma was a 1980s slasher movie a la Friday the 13^th that spawned a series of increasingly schlocky sequels and is now only really fondly remembered by horror aficionados. We also learn that the woman who starred in the original film, Billy, withdrew from public view and has been hardly heard from since. We pick up in our current time, as Kris is a young director hot off a Sundance hit who’s been hired to reboot the Camp Miasma franchise. To hear her tell it, she got the job because studios want “elevated” horror these days, which, she says, means “woke” horror, and she’s a queer filmmaker, so we can connect the dots. But it’s also true that the Camp Miasma films were formative pieces of culture for Kris, and she doesn’t just want to do justice to the movies, she wants to bring something truly new and important to them. Naturally, she goes to find Billy, who, it turns out, lives in the defunct sleepaway camp that was used for the very movie she starred in.

The majority of Schoenbrun’s movie involves the interaction between Kris and Billy in Billy’s cabin, with lines sometimes blurring between reality and fantasy, and sometimes doing a lot more than blurring. It’s strange, and dark, and funny, and sexy, and occasionally completely surprising, especially with some of the decisions Gillian Anderson makes in how she presents Billy. And while the movie itself is hardly a conventional slasher, Schoenbrun does let us see parts of what may or may not have been the original Camp Miasma film, and boy howdy, those geysers of blood are a heck of a good time.

Each of Schoenbrun’s films is layered in text and metatext, and so there’s a lot to read into here, depending on where you want to place your attention. But a consistent theme involves the process of acknowledging who we truly are as people, as messy and cruel as that can be. The filmmaker’s characters have not always been able to do this, sometimes with horrific consequences, but this time, joyfully, we get to see what happens when they can.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in theaters.