By Genevieve Dammery

Jane Schoenbrun puts the camp in Camp Miasma. There are few things more dangerous than a film obsessive with a camera, a childhood fixation and a lot to say about horror cinema. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes this premise and runs with it… through the woods, after dark, while chased by someone wearing a suspiciously elaborate mask.

Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young queer filmmaker who has been given the task of resurrecting Camp Miasma, a dormant, transphobic-trope laden 1980s slasher franchise. A fan of the original films, Kris seeks out Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the franchise’s original Final Girl and who now lives in seclusion at the original filming location. What begins as an attempt to recruit Billy for the reboot gradually becomes something more complicated: an encounter with the characters that have shaped Kris’s relationship with cinema, and with herself.

Kris initially approaches Camp Miasma attempting to understand why a particular image from the original film has remained lodged in her mind. But the film rejects the idea that desire can be solved through analysis. Eventually, Kris admits that she doesn’t merely want to understand what she sees; she wants to experience it.

And this is where the film’s queerness becomes particularly interesting. Camp Miasma is fascinated by the relationship between watching and wanting. Kris is not merely attracted to the bodies and images on screen; she wants to become them. The slasher genre, with its masks, transformations and unstable identities, becomes an ideal playground for this fantasy.

The fictional Camp Miasma franchise is a gleefully ridiculous embodiment of a classic slasher series, complete with mythology, violence and a gender-fluid killer called Little Death. The film reproduces the iconography of 1980s horror while simultaneously interrogating its more uncomfortable legacies of misogyny and transphobia. Rather than condemning these older films, Schoenbrun asks why we remain deeply attached to art whose politics we no longer accept, and whether that attachment can itself be reclaimed.

This is where Gillian Anderson is brilliant. As Billy, she initially appears as a familiar archetype: the ageing Final Girl, haunted by her biggest role. Billy seems to understand that there is little value in separating the real world from fantasy world when fantasy has already become part of who you are. Her performance is simultaneously camp, seductive, funny and a little sinister. Hannah Einbinder is equally effective. She is awkward, earnest and sexually inhibited, someone who has spent more time thinking about desire than actually experiencing it.

Visually, Schoenbrun embraces the switch between watching and being watched, shifting between contemporary filmmaking to degraded slasher imagery and dreamlike sequences. At various points, you begin to wonder whether you’re watching a film, a film within a film, a dream, a flashback, or something else entirely.

Camp Miasma is ultimately about spectatorship. We watch Kris watching horror. Then we watch the horror watching Kris. Eventually the boundaries become blurry enough that the film seems to be asking whether there is any meaningful difference between consuming media and being consumed by it… which is profound for a film featuring this much fake blood.

Watching Camp Miasma, it is clear Schoenbrun has a lot on their mind: queer identity, gender, sexuality, fandom, Hollywood, trauma, nostalgia, and more. Occasionally, the film seems so desperate to tell us what it is about that you half expect someone to wheel out a whiteboard. But messiness is also part of the charm. This isn’t a film interested in being tasteful, it is instead interested in being excessive, theatrical and sincere beneath several layers of camp.

Ultimately, Schoenbrun understands something that many films about fandom forget: people don’t fall in love with art because it is objectively good. They fall in love with it because, occasionally, something on a screen catches you at exactly the right moment and makes you feel less alone.

Sometimes that thing is a masterpiece, and sometimes it’s a slasher about a murderous gender-fluid camp counsellor. The emotional distinction, as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma rather beautifully argues, is surprisingly small.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases in cinemas August 21: https://mubi.com/en/campmiasma