Review: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

Do not be deceived by the provocative title and misleading marketing: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is not, in fact, a deconstruction of the slasher genre. While it certainly cannibalizes some familiar tropes, conventions, and iconography—a masked killer wielding a gimmicky signature weapon, casual misogyny/transphobia (for satirical purposes only), cartoonishly copious gallons of gore—it otherwise barely resembles its most obvious sources of inspiration (Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp) in terms of visual style. Indeed, as many critics have correctly observed, the cinematic language on display makes no discernible effort to imitate the lurid, exploitative horror flicks of the ‘80s: the camerawork is too fluid, the editing too precise, the tone too modern.

Which is, of course, entirely intentional. Director Jane Schoenbrun aspires not to replicate how those aforementioned movies actually looked, but rather to convey how it felt to experience them for the first time as a young, impressionable fan. Because they are not interested in mere pastiche, homage, or parody; they penetrate deeper into the collective unconscious, dissecting the very concept of “popular culture.” They meditate on the symbiotic relationship between medium and viewer, exploring how the stories we consume irrevocably shape us—and how we, in turn, project our own psyches onto them, recontextualizing narratives and, consequently, repeatedly rediscovering ourselves.

Clearly, Camp Miasma shares quite a lot of thematic DNA in common with 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if general audiences similarly struggled with its idiosyncrasies: it’s surreal, ambiguous, open to multiple conflicting interpretations—the plot is simultaneously literal and figurative, every metaphor is meant to be taken at face value, and the distinction between objective "reality" and the protagonist's apparently distorted perception thereof is nonexistent. If, however, you adjust your expectations to properly align with the film’s particular wavelength (I’d recommend approaching it as a spiritual successor to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, though the comparison seems reductive), I predict you’ll find plenty to savor.