Review of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: A Unique Horror Experience

There are images and shots crafted in Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” that we still don’t have words for. Some films come to you not as media you watch but visions that possess you, and that approximates the haunting and spellbinding world that Schoenrun and their collaborators have so lovingly crafted. It’s a world where slasher killers slam dead campers against tetherball poles till they explode, where bodies line the walls of a video store like fiberglass insulation, where a scene of Gillian Anderson seductively holding a cornucopia of KFC dissolves an ignited fireplace.

Skewering everything from transphobia in slasher films to Hollywood’s hypocrisy of supporting “woke” stories only when it’s convenient, Schoenbrun has established themselves as a master portal maker. They’ve always been adept at making digital worlds – whether they be television shows in “I Saw the TV Glow” or the recesses of the internet in “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” – as “private alternate universes” (as one character says in the film). These virtual worlds offer safety and the ability to be seen that the outside world fails to provide.

With “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” Schoenbrun further interrogates their relationship to these spaces and the tension between the tragedy of their necessity and the beauty of their reality. What happens to these spaces when we feel comfortable in our bodies again? Does resurrection always have to require a type of death first? Is there ever a point in our lives where it’s too late to transform? That the film manages to make room for these ideas while**lacing it all with enough tacky genre thrills to make it all palatable and thought-provoking is a miraculous feat in its own right.