“It’s not like years ago,” croons Michael Stipe on R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” the spare, piano-driven ballad that brings the band’s 1992 album, Automatic for the People, to a melancholy crescendo. The song’s crystalline reminiscence of teenage horseplay is uncommonly personal and precise, like Proust by way of Don McLean. “They cannot see me naked,” the narrator sighs coyly, treading water between innocence and experience.
A stripped-down arrangement of “Nightswimming” opens director Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It’s the ideal overture for a self-reflexive horror comedy, in which a secluded lake doubles as a hunting ground; no less than skinny-dipping, serial murder “deserves a quiet night.” “Nightswimming” signals Schoenbrun’s Gen X sensibilities as surely as the allusions to Michael Stipe in their previous, ’90s-set feature I Saw the TV Glow (2024). That film was beguiling and frightening in ways that had nothing to do with jump scares or jolts; its obliquely rendered story of outsiders drawn toward—and then trapped inside—a supernaturally themed television series pulsated with analog-era nostalgia.
Schoenbrun’s characters are defined by a longing for communion, usually via obsessive fixations on pop-cultural ephemera, like the online urban legend Schoenbrun chronicled in their unsettling documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018). Their 2021 horror film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, foregrounded a teenage girl vlogging into the void, searching for kindred spirits; it threaded extremely online anxieties through a meditation on dissociation and dysphoria. The critic Richard Brody called Schoenbrun a “poet of solitude” in his review of I Saw the TV Glow, a film Schoenbrun began in the midst of their gender transition. “I was attempting to make sense,” Schoenbrun has written, “of the vast and sudden chasm that had opened underneath my feet in the aftermath of my egg crack,” the moment when a trans person breaks through their shell and realizes their gender identity. “The freefall of utter precarity.” The picture’s haunting signature image was a suburban sidewalk with a message scrawled in chalk: THERE IS STILL TIME.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie of fissures opening up over a molten core of allegory. Its heroine, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is an up-and-coming independent filmmaker, given to spelunking in sunken places in search of inspiration; while developing ideas for the next installment of a long-dormant horror franchise, she returns to the primal scene where the original film was shot, only to discover that the campground is haunted, by both the spirits of slasher movies past and the pangs of doubts about the project itself. Like many contemporary horror directors, Schoenbrun worships at the altar of David Cronenberg, and here, as in I Saw the TV Glow, they make terrifyingly and tantalizingly real the possibility that the characters will cross over from flesh-and-blood reality into a virtual realm, Videodrome-style. As well as amping up the tension between Eros and Thanatos implied by its title, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma untangles the voyeurism and vulnerability that characterize horror fandom: the yearning to be on both sides of the screen at once, to gaze through the eyes of the killer while fantasizing about being on the wrong end of the knife.
Like the Sour Patch Kids that adorn one of its most memorable sequences, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be comfort food to viewers who pride themselves on their acquired tastes. It’s a heady, deliciously visceral celebration of the toxic nourishment we derive from mass-produced multiplex junk; it indulges the queasy ecstasy we derive from consuming things that we suspect are good and bad for us in the same bite.
The funny feeling churning away in Kris’s gut is impostor syndrome, a symptom of being hailed as a “Sundance wunderkind” right out of the gate. She’s an It Girl for financiers who want to back the next Coralie Fargeat, or maybe the next Jane Schoenbrun. (Lest we miss the resemblance, Einbinder’s portrait appears on-screen next to her creator’s directorial credit.) Kris is the type of film nerd who knows her tracking shots from her De Palma–ish split diopters. “You remade Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain,” observes one character, bemused. Increasingly recognized as something of a virtuoso, she receives an offer to reboot Camp Miasma, whose iconography and mythology knowingly evoke Friday the 13th right down to the summer-camp setting and heavy-breathing antagonist. In lieu of a goalie mask, the killer known as “Little Death” hides behind an HVAC ceiling vent.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has playful fun conjuring up a slightly alternate reality in which the titular franchise is a perennial topic of conversation, and Little Death has been commodified just like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees; we get glimpses of vintage posters, commercials for amusingly authentic-looking ancillary products, and headlines narrating the commercial and artistic decline of the series. While the original thrillers came out in the era of theatrical-driven releasing, Kris is working in a streaming landscape preoccupied with what she calls “Zombie IP”—stories everyone knows but that have fallen out of fashion. Suffice to say that Stranger Things have happened than a Camp Miasma reboot, and Kris—whose love for the series is shadowed by her recognition of its retrograde misogyny and transphobia—suspects that she’s being used as a queer female creator to bring new credibility to a tarnished intellectual property.
Because horror movies traffic in extreme images, they’ve always been susceptible to charges of political incorrectness, and also ripe for revisionism; in 2021, African American filmmaker Nia DaCosta remade Candyman as a sustained critique of the racial politics of Bernard Rose’s 1992 hit. More recently, genre cinema has been subject to “pink-washing”—cynically foregrounding gay or trans themes in an effort to entice various demographics or mollify critics. (In I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun called a TV series The Pink Opaque, a sly reference to this form of obfuscation.) Kris’s work in Teenage Sex and Death pivots on her ambivalence about the pulp that shaped her taste and, if she’s being honest, her turn-ons. Setting out to find the movie’s origin story, she pilots her rental car through a frozen wasteland—an odyssey right out of The Shining.
All roads lead to the middle of nowhere—specifically to the long-abandoned Camp Tivoli and its current proprietor and solo inhabitant, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson). Billy was the breakout star of the original Camp Miasma and has maintained the grounds as a shrine to her past triumph. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, she’s a big presence who believes that the sequels have gotten small. Kris, who’s more commercially savvy than she lets on, wants to bring Billy back for the reboot, making a splashy reappearance as Jamie Lee Curtis did in the recent cycle of Halloween sequels. The casting of Anderson as the sometime idol is a masterstroke: The former Dana Scully’s geek pinup credibility shines through in her quietly flamboyant line readings, which suggest a veteran flaunting her own mystique; Einbinder meanwhile is perfectly earnest, nervous, and squirrelly, as she strives to remain socially conscious.
It’s hard for Kris to stay woke when everything about Camp Tivoli—from the oversaturated skies to the stridently artificial painted backdrops—is conspiring to hypnotize her into a state of compliance. Schoenbrun is more of a conceptualist than a storyteller, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is more about vibes than plot points; it’s structured as a seduction, beginning when Billy invites Kris to a delectable take-out feast of fried chicken (“do you like dipping sauce?” she asks her guest, not-so-innocently), and intensifying when they sit down to watch an old print of the first Camp Miasma movie, in which the young Billy (Amanda Fix) is deflowered and then menaced by Little Death in ritual fashion. There is a fine line between genuine eroticism and camp, and Schoenbrun crisscrosses it gleefully and often. Billy’s come-ons are no less lascivious for her tongue being planted in cheek; nor does a hint of irony take away from the ominous effect of her announcement—acted by Anderson with just the right degree of campfire-story finesse—that Camp Tivoli is truly haunted by Little Death, and that he lives at the bottom of the lake, “where the movies come from.”
The idea of a submerged portal birthing vengeful killers and VHS cassettes is potent stuff; the theoretical thrust of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is that scary movies aren’t so much made as channeled from some collective-unconscious twilight zone, and that the fears they instill in us don’t need to be exorcised, but embraced. This is all a little precious, but that’s the point. Kris’s tendency to intellectualize about the dichotomy between art and trash is a running joke. Her braininess is a psychic block that she wants stroked away—or maybe hacked away. (Hence the rib-nudging double entendre of “Little Death.”) While broadly mimicking the look and feel of bygone genre fare, Schoenbrun makes a persuasive case for the idea of cinema as an exhilaratingly dangerous medium. As the two women gaze intently together at Camp Miasma’s grainy, gratuitous spectacle, they can’t help seeing themselves reflected in the spooked countenance of the younger Billy; like the kids in I Saw the TV Glow, they’re paralyzed by stings of fear and desire.
There’s surely more desire than fear here: The film isn’t trying to be an actually scary movie any more than it’s a Scary Movie–style spoof. It is instead gently eerie and filled with longing, building through an increasing ambiguity in the action. Is Camp Tivoli actually fully mutating into Camp Miasma? Is Kris in the midst of a self-induced hallucination? Does she just need to get out of her own head? And does she need to be decapitated to do it?
There are real risks in making such an intricately interior movie, especially one couched in so many allusions and in-jokes. (“I’m not sure all these people understand,” sang Stipe in “Nightswimming.”) And yet Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is finally inviting: It’s hard to imagine any viewer resisting its lush, expressionistic visuals, or its tactile sensuality, or, best of all, its openhearted entreaty to pursue one’s pleasure, even if that means inviting geysers of blood. “Nightswimming” may be the anthem of Camp Miasma’s wet hot American summer, but a different decades-old pop song, which plays during the coda, best articulates Schoenbrun’s complicated affection for monsters and their nubile, achingly human prey. It’s called “I Love You Always Forever.”
