Camp Miasma Turns the Final Girl Into Desire

Horror has spent five decades letting the final girl survive without ever asking what that survival costs her afterward. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finally asks, then answers with a joint, a joke, and an ocean of blood.

Director Jane Schoenbrun, who turned adolescent dissociation into a horror language with I Saw the TV Glow, aims the new film at a different target: Carol J. Clover’s 1992 theory that slashers use sexuality to process gender fear, and that the final girl herself is the genre’s coded outlet for it. Schoenbrun does not lecture on that theory. They stage it.

A Franchise Eating Itself

The setup is pure meta-slasher scaffolding. Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a director hired to reboot the fictional 14-film Camp Miasma series, tracks down Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s reclusive star and its first final girl. Billy still believes the series’ killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), is real and stalking the grounds where the original was shot. Kris arrives skeptical. She does not leave that way.

The killer’s name does a lot of work by itself. Little Death is the old poetic term for orgasm, and once that lands, every kill in the film reads as both violence and release. The film leans into the joke rather than hiding it: a montage sequence sends Little Death through a slew of camp counselors, phallic weapon and all, scored to Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” and it plays less like a slasher setpiece than a fever dream that happens to have a body count.

A Counting Crows needle-drop under a decapitation isn’t a joke about the song, it’s a joke about how slasher violence has always run on incongruity, the wrong music over the wrong image until dread and laughter come out the same door.

The Final Girl Grows Up

Where the film earns its title is in the pairing at its center. Einbinder plays Kris’ fear and repression with a jumpiness that never tips into caricature, while Anderson’s Billy is aloof and sun-cured, quicker to pass a joint than answer a direct question. The two spend the film’s back half in a slow, escalating pull toward each other, and it is that relationship, not the slasher plotting, that carries the film’s real tension. Kris begins the story tangled in a polyamorous relationship with Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Mari’s boyfriend Thor (Aren Buchholz), unable to name what she actually wants. By the time Little Death shows up in earnest, the monster and the desire are pointed at the same place.

Composer Jim Williams, credited elsewhere with scoring Titane and Raw, gives the film a pulse that keeps it from playing as pure comedy even when the tone turns loose. That’s the balancing act Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is attempting: camp and dread in the same frame, an idea that sounds unstable on paper and mostly holds because Schoenbrun commits to the bit all the way to the kill count.

The film does not stick its landing, exactly. Its climax reaches for a tenderness the rest of the film has earned and then oversells it. That is a minor complaint against a film willing to make the final girl a metaphor for coming out to yourself rather than just outliving the man with the knife.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens in theaters on August 7. For a genre that has recycled the final girl for fifty years, Schoenbrun’s version is the rare one that treats her survival as the beginning of the story instead of the punchline.

Quick Takes

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is directed by Jane Schoenbrun and stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson.
The film follows a director reviving a fictional 14-film slasher franchise called Camp Miasma.
Jim Williams, who has scored Titane and Raw, is credited with the film’s score.