Review: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Patreon)

My girlfriend and I caught a fairly well-attended Wednesday night screening of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The audience was perhaps less queer than we expected if the paucity of blue hair dye in the room was any indication. The audience was largely college students looking to catch the new splatter movie. I wonder what they took away from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (at this point, I have to add that asking the nice lady in the ticket booth for "two for Teenage Sex and Death" was quite fun, a sentiment which I articulated to the nice lady and with which she agreed). Certainly there's enough gnarliness and squalid butchery onscreen to satiate the most avid sicko. But some of the best parts of the movie seemed to go over the audience's heads. My girlfriend and I were the only people at the screening who guffawed at the Ray Blanchard joke in the first sequence. But the fact a film with a Ray Blanchard joke was attracting the weeknight movie crowd seemed significant. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie for trans sickos and the people who love us.

The first act of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes us through the beats of a slasher With A Twist. Indie filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), tasked with resurrecting the slasher franchise Camp Miasma, travels to the town in which the original film's final girl Billy Presley (everybody's Mother Gillian Anderson) lives in total seclusion. The film takes us through the beats of Visiting a Remote Location Where a Scary Lady Lives, explicitly shouting out Sunset Boulevard debts along the way. When we meet Presley, she lives in the campground at which the original Camp Miasma was filmed. The two women bond over their proclivity for disappearing into their work, with the film's second act becoming a sexy/insane love story.

Teenage Sex and Death, like I Saw the TV Glow, wrestles with the long-term influence of vintage media on a viewer's soul. While Jane Schoenbrun's previous feature tackled that theme from the perspective of the viewer, Teenage Sex and Death deals with the viewer-turned-creator. Kris' work on Camp Miasma sees her initially struggling to reconcile her revulsion at the transphobia and misogyny of the original films with their importance to her. Fortunately for Kris, she discovers that one can be a horny pervert and find healing elements in fucked up vintage media. Trans killer Little Death (Jack Haven) is cathartic for her and Billy — sometimes it's fun watching a trans guy kill all the vicious assholes set to a Counting Crows soundtrack.

At times the movie gets too in its own head, if largely by design. If the cerebral elements of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma undermine the raw horniness of it, that's a flaw the movie is comforting having. Schoenbrun understands the experience of healing through being a fucking weirdo. Hard to think of a more essential virtue for this age.