SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
When I attended Texas A&M University, and at the time, it was over 80% white. I was constantly in search of classes that had flavor and color… literally. Considering the demographic of TAMU, there were slim pickings.
There weren’t many liberal arts classes that went beyond the baseline. There were absolutely zero Asian or Asian American classes that explored literature or culture. I took African American history and literature… and that was about all there was.
As a journalism major, I also enrolled in “Women and Minorities in Mass Media”. Each week we discussed a piece of media that aligned with the title of the course. I clearly remember the week when we had to pick a Harlequin Romance novel and do an analysis on how the women were depicted. I chose one titled “Waiting for Eric” — or something like that.
The week we discussed slasher films was very exciting for me because I was a hardcore Scream fan. By that time, Scream 3 had already been released, and I thought the franchise met its peak. Yet, here we are 26 years later. An unfortunate excuse for a seventh installment was released in February, and there’s an eighth in development with Poker Face showrunner alums Lilla and Nora Zuckerman.
With the release of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I finally had the opportunity to revisit all that I learned from “Women and Minorities in Mass Media” … or at least what I remember from it.
Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to the more lukewarm I Saw the TV Glow is an exploration of the slasher genre. Schoenbrun goes spelunking through “final girl” tropes, gender identity, desire, and repression. All represented by a mascot in the form of a camp killer from a slasher movie masked with an air-conditioning vent and armed with a harpoon.
Camp Miasma made me recall my nerdy collegiate days in “Women and Minorities in Mass Media”. That should tell you what kind of movie this is. It’s a movie that requires attention, critical thinking, and patience — and that’s for a very specific demographic.
Schoenbrun delightfully skewers, dissects, and deconstructs the slasher genre to the smallest detail. Sometimes it makes me nod with artistic appreciation, while other times, the film brings me an incredible amount of queer joy. Then there are times when I roll my eyes and think, “We get it — you’re an auteur. Calm down.” And finally, there are times when I just stared blankly at the screen with my mouth open.
Because the film is layered with narrative complexities, there will be several people who gush and praise it before they even watch it. At the same time, it has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I too will mark it as “Fresh” on RT, but I admit that as Camp Miasma entered its third act, I became increasingly puzzled, but still entertained.
Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting Camp Miasma, an iconic slasher franchise that once starred the once up-and-coming scream queen Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson). After a short-lived career as a scream queen, Billy became a recluse in a cabin in the woods, appropriately.
As their relationship unfolds, lots of shit goes down. To call this film “meta” is an understatement. If anything, it’s “mega-meta” and Schoenbrun gloriously paints the screen with a fever dream of a slasher movie that is dripping with queerness. And they do it with such unapologetic joy — which always makes for a fun cinematic experience.
Einbinder and Anderson make a great on-screen couple, with Anderson serving her best impression of Dolly Parton while donned in a Norma Desmond turban and glorious robe with dolman sleeves.
The queerness of this movie is off the charts, which makes it utterly delightful.
Einbinder and Anderson carry the film to the finish line with a bloody confidence that makes Schoenbrun’s narrative maximalism tolerable. (And the obvious, yet charming movie set façade.)
When I Saw the TV Glow was released, Gregg Araki interviewed Schoenbrun for Filmmaker Magazine. During the interview, they mentioned their yet-to-be-released Camp Miasma. “It’s funny, my next movie is all about sex—essentially a movie about learning to enjoy sex after transition. Pre-transition, it wasn’t that I was asexual—I had plenty of desire—but having good sex in the wrong body was impossible.”
Schoenbrun builds a world around this with extreme thoughtfulness and a clever, artistic eye. As Kris and Billy’s attraction becomes stronger, the desire and yearning to have sex in the correct body becomes palpable. One can say it can make you thirsty.”
Camp Miasma may float on a fantasy of pretentiousness and confuse the fuck out of you, but Schoenbrun knew exactly what they were doing.
Schoenbrum could have easily taught that “Women and Minorities in Mass Media” class.
Slasher films are a bloody affair, but it also has a layered subtext that examines gender and queerness — why else do you think they call it “the final girl”? Slasher pics also put the microscope on the act of sex as less of a carnal joy and more of a punishable offense. Scream blatantly points this rule out: have sex, get killed. Camp Miasma is a collision of all of this — with thoughtful nods and homages to classic slasher and horror pics.
Camp Miasma fulfills nearly everything I learned about slasher movies in “Women in Minorities in Mass Media” class. For one, the heroine tends to have a masculine name. In the case of Camp Miasma, it’s Kris and Billy. In Scream, it’s Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). In Alien, it’s Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). In I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jennifer Love Hewitt plays Julie — which is not a masculine name, but her last name is James. The same can be said for Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in What Lies Beneath: Claire Spencer. In Halloween, it’s Laurie Strode (yes, Laurie can be a man’s name).
It can also be argued that Devon Sawa fulfills this trope in Final Destination. At the time, he was giving androgynous energy, and his character’s name is Alex Browning.
I could do this all day.
Masculine names for females and many other tropes can be traced to Carol Clover’s essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”. Clover even describes the “final girl” as “a physical female and a characterological androgyne: like her name, not masculine but either/or, both, ambiguous.”
If you notice, the weapon of choice in slasher and horror films is a knife, ice pick, spear, hook, or, in the case of Camp Miasma, a harpoon. It’s always something that phallically penetrative. As Clover points out, despite having gone through a battle and stab wounds, the final girl survives because of her masculine qualities, which help her defend against the killer.
Camp Miasma digs deep into the treatment of non-male bodies in slasher films. Schoenbrun puts an intentional and satirical lens on it. At one point, Kris strips down to her underwear with her perky nips pressed against her crop top as she runs from the HVAC killer in slow motion, gasping for air. A scene that is all too familiar for slasher film fans.
Towards the end of the movie, Kris and Eric are seen soaked in blood but comfortable with it as they shop for stoner snacks at the convenience store. This is after they achieve a fruitful, genuine, and murderous orgasm together.
At the same time, Camp Miasma magnifies the way female bodies are treated as sites of mutilation and trauma due to the penetrating blade of the killer — who is often male (we’ll get to that in a bit).
Maisie Jennings’s essay “Blood, Guts, and Girlhood: The Feminism of Body Horror” dives into this and uses Carrie as a benchmark, marking it as a “menstrual horror” subgenre. In it, we saw Sissy Spacek and her dirty pillows lay waste to an entire high school as the titular telekinetic. Jennings points out how Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel turns female puberty into a monster, thus making female bodies a threat.
Which brings us to the next point: purity. As mentioned, sex is a no-no. If you have sex, you get penetrated in a more distasteful way.
When it comes down to it, Camp Miasma is all about chipping away at the mold that the world is shoehorned into. In other words, it’s here to break us all of what the patriarchal dominant culture has made us subscribe to.
Basically, you have to be a hetero, cis, white, and female virgin to survive a slasher pic. And the final girl is the one who can preserve the heternormative status quo and save it from the masked killer, who is often an outsider who was abused or tormented by dominant forces (i.e., Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers) and is looking for justice.
This includes Ghostface from Scream.
In the first groundbreaking installment, Wes Craven subverted the genre and broke rules that we weren’t aware of. In the final moments of the movie, it is revealed that Billy and Stu were the killers. The motive? Sidney’s Dad was screwing Billy’s mom. As a result, Billy and his best friend went on a killing spree to provoke Sidney. At the end of the day, Scream was about two queer-coded killers looking to right a wrong in a heteronormative situation. (For the record: I don’t condone going on a killing spree to teach someone a lesson.)
… and is it a coincidence that the killer in Scream shares a name with the Camp Miasma heroine?
Schoenbrun’s has an unshakable commitment with creating this mega-meta slasher film experience that doesn’t shy away from trying to make a point — even if you don’t know what the hell is going on. Camp Miasma is a sublime journey of gender, queerness, sex, repression, desire, and taking full ownership of the body that is rightfully yours and allowing yourself enjoying every inch of it. Now if we can get similar cinematic experience that navigates people of color’s position in the slasher and horror movie sphere, that would be fantastic.
Like Peter Marra and his dissertation Queer Slashers and Harry Benshoff’s book Monsters in the Closet, Camp Miasma aligns with the allegory of “the queer monster looking to terrorize heteronormativity”. Instead of making it academic and institutional, Schoenbrun breaks convention with this concept, anatomizes it, breaks it apart, campifies it, and puts it back together in their own euphoric way.
