Don’t move, don’t shout – Little Death is about. Who’s Little Death? Good question.
Short answer: he’s a strange serial killer who comes out of the lake of your everyday haunted summer camp and lays waste to all of the local counsellors, the whole randy lot of them. If that’s not specific enough, then I suppose I could add that he wears a rusty air vent on his head rather than a hockey mask. That look was already under copyright…
‘Haven’t you heard? Camp Miasma’s re-opening this year!’
Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma kicks off to a rattling start with a similarly brief introduction to its central slasher villain. The star of the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, we see cameras roll on the very first film in the series – shot sometime in ‘82, most likely – with Little Death marching towards a pair of unlucky lovers, who he swiftly dispatches, resulting in the kind of splatter-show you might expect from a dancing fountain.
That opening beat brings us into the world of Camp Miasma very quickly, promising many more laughs in the two hours ahead. From that very first kill, I chuckled all the way through the film’s opening credits and out the other end, as we see the franchise go from runaway success to global phenomenon then back down to cult classic status before one, or two or three too many sequels landed it in thoroughly niche territory. Fans of Friday the 13th will spot the obvious parallels: the film wears its inspirations with pride, as Little Death hits Manhattan before being born again in metal (full metal this time; not just the vent) with the seemingly spacey Miasma 3000.
Plucked from the bottom of the bargain bin in the hopes of making the big studios some more of that thing they love so much – money – Camp Miasma is getting a remake, with queer director Kris Williams chosen to give this problematic property a shot in the arm.
As Kris herself admits, she’s there to add some ‘wokeness’ to proceedings, though the original Miasma film was practically her awakening. With the franchise near and dear to her heart, she aims to bring it back in a big, bold way, and sees no better angle than bringing back its one-time star, Billie Presley (played by Gillian Anderson), the original film’s Final Girl.
Securing a meeting with Billie, Kris drives well into the sticks to make the date, eventually arriving at the snowy Camp Tivoli, the site of the original Camp Miasma shoot (and fittingly, the real-life murders that inspired it). Living permanently among the abandoned campgrounds like Walt Disney squatting down Main Street USA, Billie’s life of isolation is an odd one. As it happens, though, neither woman may be as alone as she thinks…
I’m not a campsite slasher devotee by any count – I’ve only ever seen the first Friday film, which Jason’s barely in – but I do have a soft spot for the genre, albeit mainly based on cultural osmosis and video games like Until Dawn and the brilliant yet ill-fated Friday game that let you step into Jason’s big boots to hunt down your friends. I did, however, watch Sleepaway Camp for the first time at the start of the year and found it horribly dull and hideously transphobic. Camp Miasma faces similar accusations here, with Little Death catching flack for his satirically overblown backstory, which makes an effort to hit every red flag of that era in a knowing wink to us in the audience.
You could imagine a version of this film getting the measure of this completely wrong and managing to feel just as outdated and problematic as the source material it’s trying to poke fun at, but non-binary writer/director Jane Schoenbrun (whose last feature, I Saw the TV Glow) found massive success, has the credentials and the wherewithal to keep things on the straight and narrow. Occasionally, the film takes perhaps one step too far – given that it clearly lifts so much from Sleepaway Camp, it almost gives the game away to have the characters mention the films themselves – but these are microscopic moments in a wider, compelling picture.
It’s quite hard to categorise Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma. It certainly does everything it says on the tin, but it’s not an out-and-out horror film, nor does it get bogged down entirely in its self-awareness. It dabbles in 80s parody at times, hitting its beats near-perfectly, with the caveat of what, to my ear, sounded like diegetic music of a later era rather than the synths and screeches of slasher scores from that period. The film’s real-world sequences are complemented nicely by a subtle, acoustic score that sells the loneliness of this backwater camp, as well as its inherent ethereal quality, as well.
There are surprises in store for us and the film has some tricks up its sleeve, but they never distract from the core rapport between the two women, who both have sizzling chemistry even when they’re just devouring some KFC together. Hannah Einbinder stars opposite Anderson as Kris, whose struggles to wrangle this material feel incredibly personal as she grapples with coming face-to-face with one of her greatest heroes. I haven’t seen Anderson in too many things – shamefully, I’ve only seen the first two episodes of X Files – but she really transforms into Billie here, so much so that despite her name cropping up on the poster and in the opening credits, I still didn’t recognise her ‘til later on than I’d care to admit!
While some visuals seemed a little shonky (though I couldn’t quite work out whether that was intentional or not at times), my brief stay at Camp Miasma was a barrel of laughs, a ton of fun and a bucketload of bodily fluids. It’s a really interesting and twisty story about the way we view the stories and media we hold close and the self-reflection that that media can, in turn, trigger in our own lives. To say any more would spoil things, but these were two hours well spent.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong bloody violence, sex, drug misuse, discrimination, threat, language.
Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma is in cinemas now.
