After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic young director for resurrection. But when she visits the original's star, a now-reclusive actress shrouded in mystery, the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.

The Garden Cinema View:

Across her three feature films to date Jane Schoenbrun has established an innate grasp of the ways in which people engage with media, and a remarkable ability to translate these experiences into cinema. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was coming-of-age for the terminally online, whilst I Saw the TV Glow explored the role of nostalgia and television in identity formation for misfit 90s kids. With Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Schoenbrun sets their sights on how 80s slasher fandom and filmmaking has impacted upon film studies, cultural theory, and gender politics. But whilst this is a film full of complex ideas, Camp Miasma never feels over-intellectualised. Schoenbrun instead enjoyably and lightly parodies many of these positions, understanding that the enjoyment of horror film, and indeed the self-identification found within, arises from an tangibly emotional place. As with their earlier films, this is an felt experience and a sensory rabbit hole which often defies conventional narrative logic.

Beyond and besides this, Camp Miasma is also a meta-textual-horror love letter in the mode of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (amusingly referenced at one point), and also an erotic psychodrama which quotes Sunset Boulevard (directly) and Persona (visually). All of which wouldn’t work without the very funny and sensual chemistry of the central performances from Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. This is a film to indulge in. An invigorating and inspiring experience, and a fitting close to Schoenbrun’s impressive ‘Screen Trilogy’.

Cast:
Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson