Horror cinema’s transgressive nature grants storytellers the freedom to explore taboos, most prominently around sex and death. Sometimes these topics are addressed with care and insight. Often, they’re not. Gender-nonconformity, in particular, often appears as a source of evil. Movies like Silence of the Lambs, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Death Spa, Dressed to Kill, In Dreams, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sleepaway Camp, the more recent Titane, and the grandmother of them all, Psycho, feature gender-bending homicidal maniacs. In pre-internet times, trans kids might first see a character like themselves in a rented VHS—and then, immediately after, see themselves as monsters to be destroyed.

Jane Schoenbrun’s new horror/comedy/romance Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma explores the complicated masochistic relationship queer horror fans have with the genre that celebrates them and demonizes them, that gives them a voice and then decapitates them with a machete.

Together with Schoenbrun’s previous works, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Teenage Sex and Death forms the third part of a spiritual trilogy about queerness, isolation, and overidentification with horror media. In part one, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a lonely gender-nonconforming kid loses herself in a dangerous obsession with an internet creepypasta. In I Saw the TV Glow, a deeply depressed gender-nonconforming character named Owen trudges through life like a ghost, hunting for their true self in a spooky 1990s kids’ television series. And in Teenage Sex and Death, an anxious, repressed gender-nonconforming artist finds self-actualization in the bloody world of slasher movies.

 

“Oh My God, She’s a Boy!”

Schoenbrun’s film-within-a-film, Camp Miasma, alludes to many beloved horror franchises, and it visually imitates the Friday the 13^th series in particular (with a sprinkling of Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head). But it is overwhelmingly, resolutely, a love letter to Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp, a cult ’80s slasher flick about a bunch of vulgar, horny kids and counselors getting killed at a poorly-run summer camp. The low-budget trash-fest is name-dropped repeatedly throughout Schoenbrun’s film. The campground shares its name, Tivoli, with a Hudson Valley town about an hour south of Argyle, New York, where Sleepaway Camp was shot. And Camp Miasma’s origin story parallels Sleepaway Camp’s conclusion.

Sleepaway Camp, released in the pre-woke year of 1983, was probably going for homophobic shock value with the Psycho-style final reveal of the timid, relentlessly-bullied child protagonist Angela as an AMAB mass murderer. Throughout the film, queerness brings corruption and death. Angela’s father’s same-sex relationship leads to confusion, possible incest, and, somehow, a fatal boating accident. Angela’s transition is forced upon her by her deranged aunt (who is also a doctor) in very much the way J.K. Rowling thinks gender-affirming care works.

Yet the ridiculous acting, the bizarre dialogue, the revealing men’s attire (male camp counselor uniforms in the 1980s evidently consisted of crop tops, booty shorts, and the occasional fishnet muscle tee), and the characters’ adolescent obsession with heterosexual performance turn the movie into an exercise in camp (pun inescapable).

Some transgender fans claim Angela as an avenging anti-hero. “Angela’s surprisingly justified in all the kills that she does,” says May Leitz, a trans YouTuber and musician who briefly appeared in Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. “She’s a queen.” It is true: all of the characters Angela offs are awful people. Two of her victims are pedophiles—one dispatched with a bow and arrow, the other boiled in a giant cauldron of corn on the cob. Most are bullies who harass Angela in politically fraught spaces like bathrooms and swimming holes. One is a selfish boyfriend who oversteps Angela’s boundaries and then cheats on her—a cad at best, a creep at worst. It’s easy for a contemporary viewer, especially a trans one, to root for Angela as she kills people.

Is it problematic to do this? Should we feel guilty for enjoying it? What if you’re trans? What if you’re trans, but the wrong kind of trans, like trans masc or agender, not trans femme like Angela? Is this a reclamation, or some kind of betrayal?

The two major characters at the center of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma represent different ways of engaging with thorny questions like these. One, a veteran of the peckin’ party that is online queer media discourse, has over-examined and hyper-analyzed and privilege-checked herself into misery. The other is content to smoke weed, eat candy, and enjoy the fucking movie.

 

---

 

Miasma

In Greek mythology, a miasma is a kind of contagious spiritual pollution that can cling to a place where a sin has been committed, wreaking havoc until the miasma is removed. In Schoenbrun’s film-within-a-film, Camp Miasma, the sin is a transphobic murder inflicted upon a genderfluid kid, and the curse is a slasher named Little Death, who emerges from a lake clad in an air vent mask and a plastic suit to murder horny heterosexual teens with a phallic spear.

Teenage Sex and Death’s protagonist, the excruciatingly Millennial Kris, is a young indie filmmaker tasked with resurrecting the worn-out Camp Miasma franchise, with orders from the studio to make it “elevated,” i.e. “woke.” Kris knows from the start that she’s a diversity hire, chosen to pinkwash the series’ problematic elements, because she/they’s queer—the kind of queer that involves tedious board games and polycules with goofy bisexuals named Thor.

As with many threadbare IPs, the new installment of Camp Miasma is meant to be a prequel focusing on Little Death’s origin story. (In other words, it’s a movie that must end with a little queer kid getting drowned in a hate crime.) But instead, Kris becomes infatuated with the first Camp Miasma’s leading lady, Billy (played by Gillian Anderson in full Norma Desmond mode), who has retired from acting to live a reclusive existence in the abandoned summer camp where the first movie was shot. Kris wants to move the story forward with Billy as the star. In Billy, Kris sees the queer neurotic’s greatest fantasy: a rich, hot older person who will fuck whatever’s wrong with you out of you.

But Kris has a mental block around sex. She’s too smart for her own good. She hides from sex through her work, intellectualizes it, dissociates during it, and can only experience any kind of pleasure by imagining herself as a character in the old Camp Miasma movies. Despite all her queer feminist rhetoric, Kris fantasizes about being the kind of bimbo who gets chased half-naked through a boobs-and-blood flick by a masked killer whose name is a French euphemism for orgasm. She knows it’s bad for her—sexual junk food, like the KFC Billy proudly serves on a silver platter during their first meal, sensuously swallowing with dippin’ sauce.

The film is autobiographical in that respect. In an interview for Filmmaker Magazine, Schoenbrun told Gregg Araki, “Pre-transition, it wasn’t that I was asexual—I had plenty of desire—but having good sex in the wrong body was impossible.”

Is it wrong to sexually identify so much with a trashy slasher movie? Is it misogynistic or self-destructive to see yourself as the translucent screen between killer and victim? During their private viewing of Camp Miasma, Kris, like a teacher’s pet calling out the answer while another student’s hand is up, chirps, “This part’s transphobic,” to which Billy replies, simply, “Shut up.”

“Okay,” says Kris.

Katharsis

To exorcise a miasma, the Greeks performed purification rituals. These rituals might involve inflicting fatal vengeance upon the original transgressor. Sometimes, priests washed the miasma away using water or the blood of a sacrificial animal.

In Teenage Sex and Death, a miasma of hyper-intellectual anxiety clouds Kris’s mind, preventing her from reaching sexual ecstasy. To purge the curse, Billy invokes Little Death to hack through the figures who embody Kris’s hangups—the annoying polycule, the obnoxious movie studio executives, the money-grubbing agent, and, finally, Kris’s biggest enemy, herself—and baptize her in blood. “It’s all just flesh and fluids,” Billy says, against Kris’s endless yapping about the gender dynamics of the slasher genre.

Is it toxic to fantasize about watching your partner’s partner get killed just so you can cum? Is it disempowering to shut your brain off so you can get laid? Is the age gap between Billy and Kris problematic? Is Kris selfish for enlisting Billy to sexually heal her through violence? The film seems to dare us to pick apart these questions endlessly in thinkpieces and video essays and on social media. This is the hard part: shut up. Okay?

A Long Dismember

Slasher movies started running out of steam as the 1980s turned into the ’90s. You can only kill so many horny teens before the audience gets bored. But as the trend started to go stale, critics, who had previously dismissed the genre as low-brow misogynistic trash, began to reappraise horror movies as commentaries on misogyny rather than expressions of misogyny. In her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol J. Glover argued that horror movies were actually about women fighting against the oppressive male gaze (represented as the killer point-of-view cam in slashers like Halloween and Black Christmas) and taking back their agency from male oppressors. This is the book that coined the term “final girl,” referring to the horror movie heroine who survives the slaughter and defeats the bad guy.

Filmmakers paid attention. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) deconstructed the earlier Nightmare on Elm Street films with a meta story about Freddy Krueger entering the real world to attack Heather Langenkamp, the actress who played the final girl in the first Nightmare movie. Two years later, Craven pounded the last into the coffin with Scream. This 1996 slasher movie, about a group of slasher-obsessed teens getting slashed by a masked slasher-obsessed slasher, proudly skewered the cliches and “rules” of the slasher genre, like “don’t have sex,” “don’t drink or do drugs,” and “never say ‘I’ll be right back.’”

Since then, the meta slasher has killed the traditional slasher and now runs amok wearing its victim’s skin. In works like The Cabin in the Woods, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, You’re Next, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, the many Scream sequels, Scream Queens, Final Girl (2015), The Final Girls (2015), and the upcoming The Last Final Girl and The Final Girl Support Group (based on a novel with the same title), self-aware, often snarky characters talk about slasher movies while getting slashed in slashers that riff on slasher tropes. If anything, the meta slasher genre is calcifying into its own set of cliches. You can only explain what a final girl is so many times before the audience gets bored.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is made by someone who knows all this, and knows that you know all this. It takes for granted that the audience has heard the term “final girl” and does not stop to explain what it is. It takes for granted that the audience has absorbed and/or produced many hundreds of posts and memes and YouTube videos and podcast episodes about horror, and horror tropes, and whether horror tropes are misogynistic or empowering, and whether cinematic nudity is sex-positive or male-gazey, and whether age gap relationships are inherently exploitative, and whether BDSM is liberating or merely codifying abuse, and whether polyamory is decolonizing romance or regressing into a Handmaid’s Tale-style mini sex cult. It takes for granted that we have gone so deep into the discourse of culture and horror and sex, on the screen and off of it, until the discourse itself has become the focus, sucking all our energy and emotion into it, leaving us tired and stressed out and frigid and lonely.

That’s how Kris is, before she learns how to get out of her own head. And if you’re a queer horror fan who spends too much time on the internet, you might have that in common with Kris. (And if you’re reading this article, you’re probably a little bit like that, too.)

Less of a meta-slasher, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is almost a meta-meta-slasher about meta-slashers, and the perils of over-analyzing the things you love. It asks us to acknowledge the contradictions, the discomfort, and move on. Thinking will only take you so far; you have to go on and live a little. Stop worrying so much. Embrace bimbo mindset. Get laid and go outside.