Last night I headed to SIFF Cinema Uptown for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and seeing this one in 35mm was exactly the right way to experience it. Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film takes the familiar ingredients of an ’80s summer-camp slasher and turns them into something much stranger, funnier, sexier, and considerably more personal. The story follows Kris, a young filmmaker tasked with resurrecting the fading Camp Miasma horror franchise. While researching the original film, she tracks down Billy Presley, the actress who played its legendary final girl.
Billy has become a mysterious recluse living at the very camp where the original movie was filmed, and their meeting sends both women into increasingly surreal territory. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are fantastic together. There’s an unpredictable energy between them that keeps the film constantly shifting between horror, comedy, fantasy, desire, and something much more emotionally vulnerable. What I really loved is that Schoenbrun clearly understands the movies that inspired this one, but isn’t interested in simply recreating them.
Instead, Camp Miasma looks at what those old horror movies taught us about sex, gender, desire, fear, and who gets to be the monster. And then it gets gloriously weird. The 35mm presentation added another layer to the experience. There’s something wonderfully appropriate about watching a film that’s so obsessed with the mythology of old genre cinema actually flicker across a big screen in a traditional film format. After I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun has once again made something that feels intensely personal while still being an absolute blast to watch. Strange, bloody, funny, horny, heartfelt, and completely its own thing. Exactly the kind of movie I want to discover at SIFF.
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