We’ve had a lot of time with slashers. It’s been more than fifty years since the boom in the ‘70s that launched many of the best-known franchises. In that time, we’ve seen nearly every spin on the genre imaginable. Jason has been to space. Scream popularized the meta, self-conscious take on the genre. We’ve been given countless sequels, reboots, and new films hoping to spawn a new franchise. It is hard to do something with the genre that hasn’t been done already, but that is exactly what Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma does.
Granted, Teenage Sex and Death is not a true slasher, but rather a movie about a slasher franchise. A young, up-and-coming director, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), has been contracted to write and direct a reimagining of Camp Miasma, a fictional franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th or Sleepaway Camp. She travels to meet the final girl from the first film, Billy (Gillian Anderson), whom she hopes to bring back for her new and reimagined take. After starring in the first Camp Miasma, Billy has retired from acting and bought the camp where they shot her film.
From there, Teenage Sex and Death explores a lot of ideas and possibilities, but never fully commits to a twist or a true premise. The lines are gloriously blurred between what’s real, what’s fictional, and what’s metaphorical or imagined. And the marvelous magic trick that Jane Schoenbrun performs is making us not really care. Sometimes the rising action of a film is the most fun, so Schoenbrun gives us rising action in several different forms. After the film’s more traditional setup, we see quite a bit of the first act of the first Camp Miasma film, with Kris and Billy’s commentary. Two-thirds of the way through the film, we are still meeting new characters and exploring ways that the Camp Miasma franchise and its primary antagonist, Little Death (Jack Haven), could intersect with the characters that we have met.
This playfulness around what’s real and what isn’t is balanced out by a very strong thematic throughline around getting comfortable with sex. Kris has a somewhat complicated and dissociative relationship with sex, getting in her own head and finding it difficult to connect. But the Camp Miasma franchise served as a bit of a sexual awakening for Kris, and both Kris and Billy find themselves turned on by the intermingling of sex and violence of the films. The film explores the process of getting comfortable with sex and being okay with our weirdness, quirks, and hangups – as Billy says, “it’s all just play.”
So Teenage Sex and Death isn’t a true slasher, though it has the kills, the tension, and the iconic villain that make slasher films so fun. It isn’t an elevated horror film, though it has a lot to say thematically about problematic portrayals of transness in cinema history, queer desire, and getting comfortable with sex. This is a film that avoids neat categorization, but that doesn’t mean it’s difficult – in fact, the thing that stands out about Camp Miasma is how damn entertaining it is. It is very conscious of its audience, and it wants to give them the gratifying thrills of slasher-style horror, the knowing wink of expectation subversion, and representation with a theme that hasn’t been explored by many films but is true to experience.
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