{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-or-the-perverts-guide-to-cinema-review-philippa-snow/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":126845,"slug":"teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-or-the-perverts-guide-to-cinema-review-philippa-snow","title":"‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’; or, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema","excerpt":"Philippa Snow has never felt more surplus to requirements as a critic than while watching Jane Schoenbrun’s new film","content":"\n

Philippa Snow has never felt more surplus to requirements as a critic than while watching Jane Schoenbrun’s new film

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Picture it: a hipsterish writer is propped up in bed, surrounded by junk food and candy and utterly enthralled by the jiggling, gory mid-1980s slasher she is watching on TV. Suddenly moved by some detail in the narrative, she picks up her notebook and writes the word DESIRE, underlining it for emphasis. Am I describing a casual Tuesday night in my own life, as a female critic who loves bloody, sexed-up, questionable trash, or a scene from the film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma? I fear what I am actually describing is the birth of a meme. Camp Miasma, the latest release from the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, is a visually dazzling, eccentric and intensely intimate erotic manifesto; it is also, thanks to the thick, glossy, Gobstopper lacquer of millennial archness surrounding its gooey, chewy centre, a totally perfect generator for screenshots that people exactly as annoying as myself can post online with self-identifying captions. (This fucking play is, in fact, about us!) Its winking, metatextual plot is self-aware enough that at times, it feels as if the film is sentient, anticipating critics’ and audiences’ comments in real-time. A she/they arthouse director named Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is rebooting an old slasher franchise, Camp Miasma, and is hoping to recruit the now-reclusive final girl from its inaugural instalment, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a sultry, turban-clad grande dame who lives alone at the camp where the feature was filmed. Both characters jokingly invoke Sunset Boulevard’s (1950) Norma Desmond; in fact, Presley’s Southern-fried accent and draggy, déshabillé gorgeousness suggest something closer to a character by Tennessee Williams. The old Camp Miasma, Kris tells Billy, prompted her sexual awakening, and she wants to produce a queerer take on the story with a politicised dimension. The two characters, one aged about thirty and the other about sixty, begin a love affair, partly built on conversations about art, sex, violence and cruelty that broadly, purportedly reflect their generational divide: censure versus pleasure, academia versus trash, subtext versus text.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, dir. Jane Schoenbrun, 2026. Courtesy MUBI
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To appreciate Camp Miasma, you do not need to know that Jane Schoenbrun was once offered the chance to helm a reboot of the Leprechaun franchise, though this helps. You do not need to have read Carol J. Clover’s seminal feminist take on slasher films, Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992), either, but this might help, too. Everything you do need to know is contained within that single, dryly humorous shot of Kris underlining DESIRE in her notebook, à la Marge Simpson forecasting ‘sexy results’. “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art,” the sialoquent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek observes in his 2006 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. “It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.” One imagines Schoenbrun would agree, and in fact The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema would make a perfect alternate title for Camp Miasma. In a sense, I have never felt more surplus to requirements as a critic than I did watching this particular film, which announces its themes the way a cinema’s marquee announces coming attractions: a foot high, in bold, in blood red and pitch black. Blades are phallic; a stab is a form of penetration; waiting to be stabbed-or-penetrated comes with an attendant comingling of sensations, from terror to arousal to envy; death and sex are on a spectrum; giving up power can be hot, even empowering; the slasher is a genderfucked, problematic genre, but sometimes pleasurably so; it is possible to be, metaphorically speaking, both the killer and the victim at once, just as it is possible to be neither female nor male, but nonbinary; we are the dreamer that lives inside the dream, and the audience that lives inside the screen. The masked killer’s name in the Camp Miasma series is, if you can believe it, ‘Little Death’ (Jack Haven). All this seemingly heavy-handed clarity is, I think on further reflection, the point, denying the viewer the opportunity to further intellectualise the action. Kris, a brainy and neurotic overthinker, cannot come easily because she is trapped in her thoughts, problematising her desires until she does not know what to want. Billy, older and less troubled by the urge to police her own psyche, talks about sex the way that Schoenbrun’s hero David Lynch once talked about making Eraserhead (1977): “I felt [it]. I didn’t think [it].”

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I Saw the TV Glow, dir. Jane Schoenbrun, 2024. Courtesy A24
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Schoenbrun, three films into their career, is already an auteur with a signature aesthetic: one indebted to the spooky uncanniness of Lynch, yes, but also to the highly stylised quirkiness of, say, a Wes Anderson. I said earlier that Camp Miasma felt a little too meme-ready for my blood – I am somewhat resistant to whimsy, and Schoenbrun has always had whimsical moments. (In their previous film, the often beautiful and sometimes ecstatic I Saw the TV Glow (2024), the teen leads attend ‘Void High School’, which is acronymised on its insignia as ‘VHS’.) The solution is to watch the film like Billy, and not Kris. As with sex itself, you have to lose yourself totally in Camp Miasma to enjoy it, overlooking all the parts that might be corny, even faintly embarrassing – the uber-millennial jokes about dipping sauce and jump scares and split diopter shots; the Counting Crows needle drop; the fact that the killer is, I must stress again, called ‘Little Death’ – until you find that you are no longer watching with your head, but with some other, fleshier part of your body. Schoenbrun repeatedly brings back the idea of candy as a motif, and who reads the ingredients on the wrappers of their junk food, anyway? No one who is genuinely eating for pleasure. Violence is sugar is sex is the movie, a swirling and orgiastic mess of signifiers that multiply and multiply. The idea is that we feel overwhelmed, a little sick, and then allow this to give way to a head-tripping rush.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, dir. Jane Schoenbrun, 2026. Courtesy MUBI
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Underneath all of its giddiness and CGI bloodshed, it is easy to miss the one bracingly challenging conceit at the centre of Camp Miasma, which is the suggestion that desire should remain unpoliced, and that the peculiar, ‘problematic’ things which turn us on should be beyond examination. Kris admits that she can only reach orgasm when picturing herself as a passive, busty victim in a slasher, pursued by a villain with a knife. More provocatively still, Billy shares the story of her first orgasm: while filming her character’s mid-sex murder, she was being penetrated for real by her scene partner, and the strange, indefinable quality that Kris claims to have seen in her eyes was a genuine mixture of pleasure and fear. It is heavily implied that this encounter was rape, though as far as I recall, the word ‘rape’ is never said. That climax remains, Billy says, the very best of her life. Though I had mostly given in to Camp Miasma’s exhortations to experience and not analyse the movie by this point, I confess that I did not know exactly what to feel about this. The prospect of exploring it enlivened me more than all the rest of the film put together, and little more thinking would not have gone amiss. Instead, we end on a comic, eroticised killing spree.

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Schoenbrun has said that Camp Miasma is a film about learning to have pleasurable sex after transition – about the bright, bloodied, screaming delivery of a brand-new self. To expect a joyful story of rebirth to include more granular detail about the very darkest mechanics of post-assault desire might be churlish, and is certainly not very whimsical of me. For years, the film-critic-turned-director Paul Schrader has used the same analogy in interviews when asked about his previous job, and this analogy has always felt, to me, instructive on the subject of writing criticism about personal art which deals with kinks, peccadilloes and the politics of fucking. ‘A critic in many ways is like a medical examiner,’ he once explained after a screening of his film Affliction (1997). ‘You open up the cadaver, and you want to see how and why it lived. And a writer, a filmmaker, is, on the other hand, much like a pregnant [person]. You know, you’re just trying to keep this thing alive and nurse it and feed it and hope that it comes out alive. You have to be careful not to let the examiner into the delivery room to kill the baby.’ Camp Miasma is so acutely personal, so devoted to expressing the director’s own feelings and experiences, that one simply has to let it live. Who am I to take a scalpel to their kooky, gory, weirdly sexy baby?

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