Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review: 'disturbing, funny and sensual'
In a great year for horror movies, this is another boundary-pusher, writes Alistair Harkness
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (18) ★★★★★
Jane Shoenbrun reinvents the slasher movie in intriguing ways with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a wild meta horror film that taps into the rich and frequently misunderstood history of this much-maligned sub-genre and comes up with something weird, disturbing, funny and sensual all at once.
It revolves around Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young, up-and-coming, Sundance-feted indie filmmaker who’s been hired to reboot the titular Camp Miasma horror franchise, a popular, now problematic, slasher series from the 1980s. Kris knows that the studio has its own cynical reasons for hiring her, but while on a research trip to visit the reclusive Final Girl of the original movie (played as a kind of Norma Desmond-style, junk-food-gobbling eccentric by Gillian Anderson), she finds her plan to subvert expectations takes an even freakier turn, one that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality and reveals the magic of movies to be something of a dark art.
The film kicks off with a fastidiously imagined opening credits history of the Camp Miasma franchise, a long-running Friday the 13th-esque series in which successive groups of nubile teens are stalked and stabbed by Little Death, a spear-wielding psycho (in a mask made from a ceiling vent) whose previous, insensitively imagined origins story is the reason Kris has been hired for the redo.
Schoenbrun, a Sundance phenom who broke through with the micro-budget trans horror films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and the outré I Saw the TV Glow, is not above satirising their own backstory here. But while whole theses could be written about Shoenbrun’s understanding of the genre and its place in movie history (references abound to Peeping Tom, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and more), what the film does really well is use the often supernatural elements of the slasher genre to explore not just its primal appeal, but the value of losing yourself in movies, even ones of dubious artistic merit.
Indeed when Kris first meets Anderson’s character Billy – living in the sleep-away camp where the original film was shot – Billy is quick to dismiss Kris’s academic posturing. Camp Miasma was about “flesh and fluid” and as the film’s world and Kris’s world start to intertwine in creepy, kinky and amusing ways, her reckoning with her own sexual repression reveals how seeing a slasher movie at the right – or usually wrong – age can leave an indelible impression that might take years to figure out. In a great year for horror, this is another boundary-pusher.
In cinemas from 21 August
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