By Keisha Taylor
This review contains spoilers
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a defiant celebration of queer joy and triumph over trauma and provides some welcome relief from the increasing hostility faced by women and LGBTQ+ people in this era. Jane Schoenbrun lovingly satirises the slasher genre, expanding on the traditional horror theme of “sex = violence” by putting play and unselfconscious joy at the centre of the film. This film is a dreamy, tender, goofy and empowering ode to getting out of your head and becoming unashamedly at home in your body.
Final Girls
While preparing to revive a classic slasher franchise, a semi-autobiographical, queer director, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), visits the reclusive star of the first film, Billy (Gillian Anderson). She discovers that this original Final Girl inhabits the camp that used as the original set, where the villain of the franchise, Little Death (Jack Haven) still lies in wait.
Kris (she/they) is a repressed, intellectual millennial earnestly trying to navigate an exploitative industry that commodifies queerness. They are tasked with giving a “woke” veneer to a problematic franchise and their colleague is even labelled as the “Queer Assistant” on an absurd studio Zoom call. She struggles to feel comfortable in her body or enjoy sexual experiences, remaining anxious and preoccupied with self-censorship.
In contrast, Billy is a sensuous and wonderfully campy Southern belle, bewitching with her old Hollywood glamour while ripping at fried chicken with her hands. She indulges in the guilty pleasures of joints and sweets, which are hidden around her house, and has a playful sense of humour. In a conversation about the horror genre, Kris cites the psychoanalytical concept Jouissance (the fusion of sexuality and suffering, pleasure and pain), but Billy drawls, “it’s about flesh and fluids.”
Jouissance
The chemistry is palpable between these apparent opposites, and as they grow closer, Kris and Billy help each other confront their trauma. Schoenbrun draws on her experience of navigating her trans identity and sex in the wrong body to inform Kris’s struggles with dissociation and sexual repression. While Billy screens the original Camp Miasma film for Kris, we realise that her sex scene was in fact her rape. Billy is literally stuck at the (camp)site of her trauma trying to resolve the resulting contradiction between violence and pleasure. In Schoenbrun’s words, “that’s the origin story of sexuality for (Billy) — and for many, many other women.”
For both, their relationship is liberatory. Rather than try to suppress or escape their trauma, they integrate it into a sexuality that works for them – their trauma-based kinks are self-actualising and healing.
“If it gets too real, you can always turn it off”
A tagline from the VHS release of the original movie affirms the centrality of consent – “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” Billy’s gentle response (offering a blanket, tea, and more sweets) to Kris’s need to pause their sexual encounter is a beautiful example of this. They then become co-directors of their fantasy – “let’s make a movie” Billy says – and they decide together what should happen next.
Part of the fantasy for Kris requires relinquishing the idea that their primal fantasies need to represent their ethical and political principles. She recognises that elements of her horror-themed fantasy (running in white knickers and a spattered baby tee with no bra, for example) are misogynistic, but she becomes able to let go of their self-judgement and have an authentic experience.
Trans killer to trans creator
In the original film, we watch Little Death’s vengeance-fueled rampage of cruel and playful violence with comical geysers of blood. But Jack Haven also conveys the vulnerability inside the mask. The entire slasher sequence is set to Counting Crow’s Long December, evoking grief, nostalgia and a fragile hope.
In Billy and Kris’s world, it turns out that Little Death was not the object of a filmmakers’ imagination, but the creator of his own stories – “this is the great trick he plays, convincing us that we made him, when really he made us.” The typical “trans killer” of the genre, and the underlying idea that gender non-conforming bodies are monstrous and doomed, is subverted. Little Death (la petite mort) is not just a destroyer, but also a creator.
The film ends with hope. Little Death, unmasked, makes his art beneath the lake, while our heroines revel publicly in their blood-soaked clothes with a trolley of sweets, surrounded by playing children. As well as being a glorious celebration of finding joy in play and intimacy in a trauma-filled world, Camp Miasma is an important queer-affirming film that deserves its immediate cult following.
