‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ winks and blows a blood-soaked kiss at horror films of queer past

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,’ directed by Jane Schoenbrun, follows aspiring filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) as she tries to reboot a fading slasher franchise by tracking down its original final girl, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), now living at the camp where the first film was shot. Their attraction complicates Kris's plans as the franchise's masked villain, Little Death, begins reappearing, its reality left ambiguous.

The piece situates the film against decades of horror tropes that coded queer or gender-nonconforming characters as monstrous, from ‘Dracula's Daughter’ in 1936 through ‘Psycho,’ ‘Dressed to Kill,’ and ‘Sleepaway Camp.’ It argues ‘Camp Miasma’ inverts that lineage by framing Billy as eccentric rather than threatening and casting Little Death's gender nonconformity as a path to Kris's self-realization rather than pathology.

The review also places the film within the self-aware slasher tradition of ‘Scream’ and the genre-blending emotional undercurrent of ‘Jennifer's Body,’ noting that ‘Camp Miasma’ largely restricts its references to visual homages, such as a kill mirroring ‘Friday the 13th Part VII,’ rather than dialogue-driven pop culture nods.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.