Sign in Subscribe
Film

A film about being horny and loving slasher flicks

And how those two things are somehow the same thing?

Tynan Stewart

Tynan Stewart

— 7 min read
Share
A film about being horny and loving slasher flicks

Hi,

If you're new to the newsletter, welcome. This post is part of an occasional series where I review films playing at the Ross Media Arts Center. Here are a few of the best ones I've written in the past six months:

Now Playing: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
It can be dangerous to coast on creative nostalgia.
This Week In LincolnTynan Stewart
A beautiful, uncomfortable film about Iraq
Now Playing: The President’s Cake
This Week In LincolnTynan Stewart
A romcom with little romance and less comedy
Now Playing: Fantasy Life
This Week In LincolnTynan Stewart

Today, I've got a piece about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which is a movie that's exactly as bloody and sexy as it sounds. This is one you should absolutely go see while it's still in theaters. Genuinely might be my favorite thing I've seen at the Ross this year not even kidding.

Anyway thanks for reading. Please consider signing up for a paid subscription if you haven't already. This newsletter needs your support to keep growing (and frankly it needs your support to keep operating at the pace I've already been publishing).

Pay for what you read

I really enjoy doing these film reviews but — like pretty much everything else I publish here — they take time. I work as a freelance writer, and every new paid subscriber means I can spend a little less time on other work and a little more time making This Week In Lincoln a better publication.

~ Ty

P.S. If you see any of the films I write about, please share your thoughts. Only paid subscribers can comment below, but anyone can send me an email: tynanstewart@proton.me

P.P.S. I've included a schedule of upcoming films at the bottom of this post!

Now Playing: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Imagine being so sexually repressed — so unable to get out of your own head and be physically intimate with another person — that you devote your life to making movies instead. That's what Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is about.

I mean, it's also about many other things, including the visceral subversive thrill of watching over-the-top kills in a slasher flick, the legacy of Hollywood's "trans killer" trope, and a hundred other interesting directions one could take in a review. But what I love most about director Jane Schoenbrun's latest movie is its depiction of the pleasures and dangers of filmmaking: How cinematic images (and pop culture more broadly) can reflect and shape our deepest erotic desires in ways that feel kinda stupid if you were to say them out-loud. (This is a safe space: I'll go first, okay? My original childhood crushes were all characters from Star Trek.)

In other words, it's a film about the impossibility of disentangling sexuality from the things we grew up watching (sometimes long before we were emotionally ready for them) but also the ways in which the media we absorb can get in the way of, well, actually having sex.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma focuses on Kris, a young queer indie director played by Hannah Einbinder, who has been tapped to resurrect an old slasher franchise known as Camp Miasma. The series, which is clearly modeled on classic horror titles like Friday the 13th and Halloween, is what Kris refers to as "zombie IP": Camp Miasma continues to stagger on long after it should've died, its miserable existence prolonged by endless sequels because its corporate owners believe they can still wring a few more dollars out of the brand.

Kris, who uses she/they pronouns, is seemingly the latest in a long list of directors-for-hire who've tinkered with the franchise over the years. But their goal is to take the old Camp Miasma material — which is, as they repeatedly remind us, problematic — and craft something new and different. (Her agent reminds her at one point that the studio is looking for "elevated" horror.) From one perspective, she's there to provide a "woke" justification for rebooting the series. Kris herself seems to hold this rather cynical view, as she reveals during a rant early in the film:

What does a studio do when there's easy money just waiting to be made on a movie franchise, just sitting there dormant, but it's one as blatantly transphobic as "Camp Miasma"? They hire a queer person to paper over the ugliness ... Weave in some perfunctory message about gender, trauma, being yourself against all odds. Bam! Zombie IP resurrected, sure. We'll just get paid.

At the same time, Kris is clearly here for more than a paycheck. Her cynicism about her role within the Hollywood machine is partly deflection, a way to intellectualize her own deep emotional relationship with the Camp Miasma franchise. Because it soon becomes clear that the slasher films, which revolve around the absurd air-conditioner-headed villain Little Death — a reference so blatant that it barely qualifies as innuendo — are inextricable from Kris's own tortured feelings about sex. She wouldn't admit this to herself (at least not at the start of the film) but she's doing the reboot, not just because her filmmaking centers on "the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity," but also because she desperately wants to learn how to be horny.

Enter the film's second lead: Billy, a reclusive, aging and extraordinarily hot actress played by Gillian Anderson. After starring as the final girl of the first Camp Miasma movie decades ago, Billy dropped out of acting altogether. When Kris goes looking for her, hoping to convince her to join their reboot project, they find Billy living at the real summer camp where the original was filmed (foreshadowing her own complicated relationship with the source material). While Billy seems to like them, she immediately clocks that Kris is too sexually uptight to make a proper Camp Miasma reboot.

For Billy, the film she starred in was about "two very simple things: flesh and fluids." A comically reductive description? Perhaps. And yet her words perfectly capture why Kris is both attracted to and repulsed by the original series.

After some coaxing, Kris reveals that sex (i.e., "that stuff") has always been secondary to her work as a filmmaker. Watching the original Camp Miasma film was, for them, a moment of queer awakening. Yet the erotic pleasure they take from the film is shameful and cringe-inducing. Kris eventually admits to Billy that she can't get off unless she imagines herself becoming a character in a slasher film — and not just any character: "A victim, a slut, tits bouncing as I run for my life."

It's not particularly "woke" of Kris to admit this. But that's part of what I find so compelling about Schoenbrun's film: It understands that desire is sometimes taboo and uncomfortable and not fully explicable. What we find erotic isn't always (or ever?) a conscious decision; for some, it's even been shaped by objectively schlocky garbage like 80s slasher films that deliver images of sexualized victimhood and penetrative violence.

Does Kris's desire to be a slutty victim represent a "healthy" form of sexuality? Are her fantasies unforgivably deviant? Did the Camp Miasma franchise permanently fuck with her brain in ways that are irreversible? Is cinephilia actually a pathology that transforms its adherents into repressed psychos who direct "elevated horror" for A24? Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is ultimately undecided on these questions. If you see it (which you absolutely should), feel free to intellectualize and over-interpret and maybe you'll find some analytically satisfying answers.

But there are plenty of other ways to enjoy the film: The film is an homage to slashers yet it's also itself a slasher (albeit one that drifts into surreal and dreamlike territory in the second half). So you could, for example, simply revel in the spectacle of hot sex scenes, comically gruesome blood-spout-inducing kills, and Schoenbrun's obvious love for visible film grain, all wrapped in a stunning visual palette. You could just sit back and let the pleasure of the images consume you.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is playing at the Ross through Thursday, September 17. You can find specific showtimes on the theater's website.

Coming Soon