Baabybelles Box Office: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
★★★★★
Returning to the big screen with their follow-up to the cult classic I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun (they/them) brings us Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. While not a sequel to I Saw the TV Glow, Camp Miasma is certainly a continuation of Schoenbrun's fascination with the way ‘fictional’ media can become intertwined with identity, desire and reality. Camp Miasma is, and I’ll be blunt, an inherently horny movie. While the narrative primarily focuses on sexuality, gender, and desire, its overarching purpose is to pay homage to the plethora of classic slasher movies that paved the way for the modern horrors we know today. Brimming with metacommentary, witty humour, and visual surrealism, Camp Miasma refuses to conform to conventional modern-horror tropes, and instead spends its two-hour runtime playing into a stylish yet deliberately ambiguous realm of dreamscape surrealism, carefully blended with grounded nuances of modern-day idiosyncrasies and sprinkled with elements of what would make a conventional slasher movie.
Netflix’s Sex Education icon Gillian Anderson stars as one of our two leading ladies beside Hannah Einbinder, who admittedly, and regretfully, hadn’t been on my radar until now; together, the duo spark some truly electrifying on-screen chemistry as we delve into their queer ‘love story’, which is essentially the film’s entire plot: a horror-obsessed filmmaker (Einbinder) trying to resurrect an 80s slasher franchise, who in turn becomes equally obsessed with the franchise’s original ‘final girl’ (Anderson). The fact that this script even outright acknowledges the ‘final girl’ trope within itself is a shining example of the meta-fuelled wit that’s strewn across the entire script, the ‘final girl’ trope, of course, being a horror/slasher staple emerging from and popularised in the 70s with classics such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween.
Honing in on its stunning 80s/90s slasher aesthetic, reminiscent of Friday the 13th and Scream, Camp Miasma implements substantial practical effects rather than relying entirely on CG or AI, which, as far as I’m concerned, is always a win (and likely to get any film an extra ★ rating from me). Combining the palpable chemistry between characters, a script with purpose, intellect, and humorous self-awareness, then pairing it with some truly entrancing visuals, it’s completely understandable how this film has received massive critical acclaim and has been graced with a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a genuine head-scratcher as to why it’s only averaging a mere 3.8* rating on Letterboxd.
Either way, I couldn’t possibly recommend this film more; it’s as much fun as it is absurd and a hilarious yet somehow grounded take on modern horror. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is out now in all major theatres.
Article By Bella Proudfoot
