Film review – Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Film review not from FrightFest – Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

I can foresee a split reaction to Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature – even a cursory glance at reviews online suggests a division between horror fans who love the set-up and milieu yet feel let down by a third act which gets away from gorecore into queer romance and LGBT millennial indiefilm fans vaguely ticked off that the film expects them to know who the creative force behind The Burning (1981) was?  NB: That Friday the 13^th knockoff was an early Harvey Weinstein credit.  I admit I’m more in the former camp than the latter, though I don’t feel excluded from the movie by what it does at the end.  It’s a dazzling work, though the highly-wrought pastiche and film biz insider digs (including ‘those rumours’ about Jamie Lee Curtis) add a distancing layer which I think makes this less eerie and affecting than I Saw the TV Glow and (especially) we are all going to the world’s fair, which are also wrapped up in imagining cultural phenomena but less overwhelmed by it.  Declaration of interest: there are some tiny parallels with my own fiction, especially the Where the Bodies Are Buried stories, though I doubt Schoenbrun is aware of them and we use imaginary horror franchises in different ways which have as much to do with nationality as sexuality.

The opening montage is a stunner, establishing the fact that Camp Miasma (1980) – which is closest to Friday the 13^th Part II and Sleepaway Camp in what we see of it, and yes indeed The Burning – was a horror hit equivalent to Halloween and F13, and has had many sequels along the lines of the Friday series (Little Death Takes Manhattan) with trips to space and the middle ages, and we see posters, video sleeves, trade cuttings and Fangoria pieces (no covers, though), down to cutesy novelty toys of the non-binary box-helmeted killer Little Death.  Every single element of this is spot on – not a parody, but a representation of a believable franchise … I even buy Little Death losing gender fluidity in sequels the way Fred Krueger stopped being a child molester.

In the narrative present, Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) – a queer indie director whose Sundance hit is described as ‘Psycho, from the point of view of the shower curtain’ – is attached to a reboot of the Miasma franchise.  The suits would like her take to be an ‘origin story’ and ‘woke’ … though she’s wrestling with personal material, since the series means more to her personally for extra-filmic reasons, and heads up to the disused summer camp in winter (a snowbound camp next to a frozen lake is a fresh setting) where the Billy Pressly (Gillian Anderson), final girl of the 1980 film, lives as a recluse.  Kris’ girlfriend (Jasmin Savoy Brown of recent Screams) makes a ‘Norma Desmond’ remark but when she meets Billy Kris pretends not to remember the name of the Gloria Swanson character in Sunset Blvd – it’s an acute observation that people who know a lot about semi-arcane fields will often keep quiet about things they know because of not wanting to seem overbearing, obsessive or nerdy (or sometimes to give other people space to contribute).  We see snippets of a ‘New Beginning’ Camp Miasma on a budget DVD from an out of the way store – now, DVD is as oldtech as video tape – but then a more sustained mini-version of the first film as Kris and Billy watch the thing on film while smoking weed.  This mixes note-perfect recreation of the early 80s slasher (with Amanda Fix as ‘Young Billy’) with outrageous gore fountains and hallucinogenic flashes suggesting Kris seeing an imagined version of the film as she misremembers or fantasises about it (she puts her ‘queer awakening’ down to watching Camp Miasma way too young).  Stephen Thrower, a critic perfectly positioned to comment on the Camp Miasma franchise, has written about the pleasures of scenes in slasher movies which don’t feature kills – the horseplay, bad jokes, strip monopoly, encounters with ominous locals (Patrick Fischler is a perfect ‘Crazy Rudolph’).  In Kris’ mind, the key scene of Camp Miasma isn’t a murder as such but the heroine’s awkward first sexual encounter … which Kris takes to suggest the harpoon-wielding LD (Jack Heaven) is preferable to a manipulative teenage boy with notches by his bedroll (though the notches don’t mean what we assume).

The last reel has Kris and Billy covered in gore literally coming together, transfixed by a harpoon but transcending screen death – with payoff cameos for caricature folk who deserve their slasher film comeuppances and a bit of where-the-movie-come-from mythology which has its Lovecraftian aspect but is also a big joke about the horror industry.  Einbinder and Anderson are fairly fearless here, not just in the emotional and physical intimacy but in being willing to look ridiculous for effect while reenacting a Friday the 13^th double kill lifted from Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood.  Schoenbrun is a witty writer – Kris explains that the downside of polyamory is ‘game nights with my girlfriend and a bisexual named Thor’ – and steeped in genre history (there’s an extended riff on ‘fright-master Wes Craven’s New Nightmare’ which echoes Greasy Stranglerspeak).

So personal it won’t please everyone, but bold, seductive, joyous, scurrilous filmmaking.