Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (15)

Filmmaker Kris is thrilled to be chosen to direct a reboot of the popular Camp Miasma horrors featuring Little Death. She is acutely aware that her appointment is politically motivated to quieten accusations of transphobia that dogged the original pictures. Leaving behind her partner Mari and polyamorous third wheel Thor, Kris travels to the abandoned summer camp where the original instalments were shot. The site is now home to Norma Desmond-like recluse and actor Billy.

LondonNet Film Review

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (15) Film Review from LondonNet

It’s no coincidence that the name of the spear-wielding antagonist in Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, a helmet-clad menace called Little Death, translates in French as la petite mort, and euphemistically refers to the sensorial overload of an orgasm. Horniness and horror are flirtatious bedfellows in nonbinary writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher, and their script delights in the tangled relationship between carnality and cinema…

Filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is thrilled to be chosen to direct a reboot of the popular Camp Miasma horrors featuring Little Death (Jack Haven). Kris is acutely aware that her appointment is politically motivated to quieten accusations of transphobia that dogged the original pictures, but she has been a huge fan of the series since seeing the first film at an impressionable age. Leaving behind her partner Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and polyamorous third wheel Thor (Aren Buchholz), Kris dives into pre-production by travelling to the abandoned summer camp where the original instalments were shot. The site is now home to Norma Desmond-like recluse Billy (Gillian Anderson), who acted in the first film.

Kris arrives during a snowstorm and Billy kindly offers homespun hospitality and anecdotes from the set. The two women watch the original film together and an emotional bond develops between the pair as they dive headfirst into a blood-soaked mythology which playfully honours Friday The 13th and its affectionate imitators. As lines between fantasy and reality become dangerously blurred and Kris becomes convinced that she wants Billy to star in her film, Little Death rises again to claim more victims.

Shot in just 25 days, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma explores a hypersexualised and problematic subgenre of cinema through an LGBTQ lens with style, stoking smouldering embers of erotic tension between the two leads until desire overflows with spurts of viscous blood. Hacks star Einbinder and Anderson burrow beneath the translucent skins of their protagonists, the latter burning bright as a fading, southern-drawled belle who is used to wearing masks on and off screen. Seldom has the act of eating a bucket of fried chicken with plentiful dipping sauce been rendered with such finger-lickin’ sensuality.

Schoenbrun conjures a familiar backstory for their seemingly immortal killer, who moves painfully slowly in a costume akin to a deep-sea diving suit. Cruel campers drowned androgynous Little Death as a child and the vengeful villain sporadically rises from the lake, clutching a metal spear, ready to slaughter everyone in the vicinity. The filmmaker builds on themes of gender identity and authentic self-expression from their previous work, which includes I Saw The TV Glow. The act of penetration inflicts pleasure and pain through Schoenbrun’s eyes, sometimes simultaneously, as characters’ moans reach a fittingly sticky climax.

– Kim Hu