Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is by no means what its unwieldy title promises to be. It is most definitely not a slasher, gorefest flick, but rather a deep, thoughtful examination of a genre that is often financial lucrative but socially complicated. It approaches the horror franchise (think about the legion of Friday the 13th slashers, and you’ll be on the right track) as part artistic homage, and especially as queer deconstruction of the inherent misogynous and anti LGBTQ+ makeup present in most of these low-budget films. Director Jane Shoenbrun, who is queer and transgender, concocts a story where queer film director Kriss Williams (Hannah Einbinder) proposes to reboot a comatose horror intellectual property, not as just another silly addition to the many movies in the franchise, but as an intellectual examination of the previous films. She sets on a wintery, snowy journey to find Billy Presley, the lead female actor of the original slasher, now a recluse, and played deliciously, in Norma Desmond mode, by Gillian Anderson. Kriss’ goal is to convince Billy to come back as the star of her new film. Their encounter at Billy’s house, in the abandoned campground where she lives, and where the original slasher was filmed, takes place over a dinner consisting of buckets of KFC. Leave it to director Shoenbrun to transform fried chicken smothered in dipping sauce look creepy and sensuous.
Before we know it, we realize that the film Kiss wants to make is very much the film that we are watching. But to call Camp Miasma meta is just an easy way to pigeonhole the film into a stereotypical classification of a current trend in filmmaking. As Kriss and Billy sit down next to each other to watch the film, in Billy’s own 16mm version, and the projector light outlines their bodies we are in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. land; this time a feminine version of it and still filled with the same repressed sexuality present when young screenwriter Joe Gillis falls trapped inside the spiderweb of Norma Desmond’s alluring mystique.
Watching the film I could not stop thinking of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, his 1865 opera which traces an illicit love affair through music which fails to achieve a resolution until a final overwhelming climax. The lovers in the opera were brought together by a magic elixir, but in this film Kriss and Billy are brought together by the elixir of film. When their union is finally consummated in what can only be described as a bloody Liebestod (Love-Death) it is brought about by the appearance of the slashing monster in the original film. A creature dressed in white with a square metal air conditioning vent for a head who carries a massive spear -- more like a phallic harpoon. In the film within a film the slasher is drowned by his homophobic fellow campers because of his gender fluidity. Now, as an avenging monster, his name is Little Death.
We know that in many horror films characters are often brutally murdered when they are in the middle of having sex. It is one of the basic tropes of the horror slasher genre, Here, Shoenbrun plays with this conceit in original ways. By naming the villain Little Death we are reminded of the French term for an orgasm (la petite mort). Equating the heights of sexuality with the violent act of a slasher is this film's supreme achievement in originality. Kriss and Billy welcome the sexual culmination brought about by Little Death, and as the film concludes we are assured that they will welcome him again and again.