Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is an upcoming filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the long-running Camp Miasma slasher franchise.
While she is suspicious that she has been hired because she is a queer filmmaker, Kris takes the gig. She has her own motive for taking the job: an opportunity to meet the franchise’s original final girl, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson).
Visiting Billy at her home, which just so happens to be the site of the original film, Kris finds herself delving into her love of the franchise, and how it connects to her own sense of self.
Sometimes a film needs time to marinate to fully understand its meaning. And sometimes it takes time for you to realise the film’s meaning was never hidden, but exactly what you think it is.
When a movie goes fully into fantasy or blurs the lines, I tend to need a little grounding.
What I liked about this is that the emotional through line becomes that anchor - Chris’s obsession with this franchise boils down to deeper issues with sex and intimacy.
I loved the in-film history of Camp Miasma, with the early film posters inspired by Friday the 13th, followed by a DTV period, with high concept sequels (I want to know more about Miasma 3000!), and that level of detail helps to immerse the viewer in Chris’s state of mind.
The film connects our obsession with pop culture to our loss of connection with other people.
It also tackles the attraction to onscreen sex and death (the underlying impulses behind horror movies, James Bond and a host of other long-running series) but without any sense of condemnation. It takes the image of a woman running semi-nude while being chased by the killer and turns it into a moment of euphoria.
The film accomplishes this by making this dichotomy the vehicle for Chris’s own fear of intimacy and her own desires.
Despite her age, she is living an adult life completely disconnected from herself. This reboot project is almost a gateway back to her adolescence, and back to her own desires.
Chris has a partner (Scream star Jasmin Savoy Brown) and is part of a polygamous relationship, although that status appears to be something her partner is more into than she is (or something she herself endorses as a way to avoid intimacy).
Billy Presley, the star of the original slasher, becomes her guide through this process.
The film makes it clear she is not a famous person - she is barely a cult figure. The film makes it clear she is part of Chris’s singular fixation on the original film - in particular, a shot of Billy’s eye during the in-film movie’s sex scene.
The riddle of the actor’s feelings in this shot recurs throughout the film, as Chris is forced to delve into her own conflicted feelings about her body and pleasure
As the film begins to blur the line between what is real and reel, and Chris begins to act on her attraction to Billy, the film turns into a strangely poignant coming of age story.
Sexy, deadpan and loving of its genre without descending into pedantry, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a gem.
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