In their fledgling but fascinating career thus far, the director Jane Schoenbrun has been consumed by the pop culture that consumes us. They’ve already proved to be an urgent voice on the matter: Their first feature, the low-budget We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, focused on the allure of online “creepypastas” and weird YouTube rabbit holes that despondent teenagers might go down. The second, I Saw the TV Glow, examined the psychological fallout of two isolated adolescents obsessed with a cult television series. Schoenbrun’s newest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is similarly interested in nostalgia: It follows Kris (played by Hannah Einbinder), a queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting a gruesome slasher franchise from yesteryear called Camp Miasma. As she does so, the past and the cynical present blend into a transfixing dilution of Schoenbrun’s interests and fears about identity and self through the prism of mass media.
Schoenbrun’s previous films were intensely melancholic affairs, and it’s immediately clear that Camp Miasma is having a bit more fun with the same themes. It jabs at Hollywood’s impulse toward rampant intellectualization—and corporatization—of the cinematic junk food of decades past. Kris, who has a minor Sundance hit under her belt, endeavors to create a “woke” and hip take on Camp Miasma without alienating its enduring fan base. A charmingly stylized early montage establishes the franchise as akin to many 1980s VHS cult classics, garishly mixing gore, nudity, and an eerie campfire vibe. The film’s many sequels yielded diminishing returns, and the series eventually stooped to wacky concepts à la Friday the 13th—the main monster, Little Death, who carries a spear and wears a mask shaped like a cubic air vent, traveled to Manhattan, then space, and so on. At her hotel, Kris watches the original film and eagerly takes notes; during a cheesy sex scene, she scribbles DESIRE in her notepad and underlines it forcefully.
Yet Kris, despite her intent to take a cerebral approach, also comes at the project with a teen sensibility. Any movie nerd might recognize her behavior: When she stops off at a gas station on a work trip, she grabs fistfuls of candy and then lazily spins through the cheapo DVD rack, excitedly calling a friend when she finds a junky Camp Miasma installment for sale. The opportunity to visit the now-abandoned sleepaway camp where the first entry was shot is both useful to her as a director and delightful to her as a fan.
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The film mostly takes place there, and Kris spends a bizarre weekend with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a reclusive actor who starred in the original Camp Miasma but refused to participate in any of its follow-ups. Billy, however, now lives at the campground with the goal of giving herself what appears to be a peculiar form of exposure therapy. Anderson, herself a towering legend of genre television and cinema, is an imperiously fun and sexy figure for Einbinder’s nervous and dorky character to bounce off of. Billy seems both enticed and exhausted by Kris, who professes her struggle to bring an academic eye to the world of Camp Miasma. Billy reminds her that the franchise’s initial appeal was straightforward: The draw was “flesh and fluids.”
As Kris spends more time with Billy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma metamorphoses from an industry satire into a dreamlike reflection on how what we watch can shape us, no matter how lowbrow. Schoenbrun renders the desolate grounds with beautiful matte-painted backgrounds; as Kris and Billy watch the old film, the fuzzy visuals and synthy score bleed away into contemporary CGI blood and carnage. Both the throwback and present-day imagery look surreal; even though Kris can identify the obvious tropes in Camp Miasma, she can’t seem to face the power that familiar scripts hold over her. And in a fantastical twist, Little Death somehow finds its way out of the Camp Miasma movies, emerging from the on-site lake.
But this is not a tale of cinema coming to life and invading the mundane real world; it’s more about two different styles of storytelling blending into one. As past and present, “fiction” and “reality” swirl together for an inscrutable final act, Schoenbrun finds a fresh way to make an incisive observation about 21st-century life: Today’s moviegoers are immersed in their screens and hungry for pop culture, to the point that a trashy flick such as Camp Miasma can feel intrinsic to Kris’s sense of self. Someone like Kris may want to interrogate that relationship over and over in search of meaning, but perhaps it’s best not to subject what we watch to endless analysis and meta-critique. Instead, we may be better off embracing how we feel.
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