Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: a Spoiler Review

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may look like it’s about Friday the 13th, but it really has another 1980s slasher on its mind. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

In the 2010s, Tumblr popularized the idea of a problematic fave: a cherished person or work of art whose past behavior or present politics revealed something objectionable or worse. Did you know that Planned Parenthood was founded by a eugenicist? That Taylor Swift once dabbled in high school homophobia?

At times it seemed as if no beloved text or personal icon, at least from anything but the most recent past, was free from the possibility that it or they might turn out to have unsavory associations. Not even figures of speech were safe. It’s not surprising that the poster behind Your Fave Is Problematic turned out to be a high school student, because the concept of an unproblematic fave is a fundamentally immature one.

(It belongs to the phase of life before you realize that your parents are human beings.) But if the phrase has passed out of use, the impulse to point out those imperfections, glaring and otherwise, is still very much with us. And so is its inverse, the push to protect the things we love, by rationalizing their faults or using them as springboards for our own more contemporary observations. Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), the 29-year-old Sundance prodigy in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, would have passed through Peak Problematic Fave at an impressionable age, but not before imprinting on the cheesy slasher franchise that gives the movie part of its title.

The opening credits walk us through the history, via a collection of well-worn artifacts: action figures of the franchise’s faceless killer, Little Death, who wields a spear and has an air-conditioning vent for a head; articles about its box-office success and eventual diminishing returns; and an ever-growing stack of VHS tapes chronicling the strained attempts to inject life into a flagging formula—Little Death goes to space, Little Death Takes Manhattan. (There’s a “final chapter” followed by a new beginning, and several more after that.) Then the bloggers arrive, attempting to reclaim the first movie’s notoriously transphobic twist as a landmark of queer visibility. What if the problematic fave could simply be a fave?

The director of a critically lauded but little-seen art-house movie she describes as Psycho, from the perspective of the shower curtain, she has been given the task of reviving Camp Miasma ’s zombie IP, which is rooted in a premise so toxic that not even an industry desperate for familiar content to recycle has scraped that far down the barrel. Kris is, as it turns out, a fan, in no small part because she first saw the film when she was 8 years old, too young to process anything but its dizzying concoction of bloody murder and lurid sex. (As someone who got his first glimpse of both onscreen gore and bare breasts from the opening scene of Jaws, I know the feeling.) But she’s learned to be ashamed of her attachment, and to pretty up that shame with film-school jargon.

When she meets Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the first Camp Miasma ’s final girl, to pitch her on taking a role in the reboot, she explains that her work is about the intersection of, um, queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity. But Schoenbrun posits another, equally valid reason for Camp Miasma ’s hold on Kris: It turns her on.