October 30 – November 1

Fri Oct 30 – 3:30 & 7:00 pm
Sat Oct 31 – 9:00 pm HALLOWEEN NIGHT ONLY
Sun Nov 1 – 1:30 & 7:00 pm

Rated 14A – 1hr 53min
Horror / Comedy

A bravura slasher with heart and guts, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma cuts deep. It’s a witty, gory slasher-romance that feels so personal to writer-director Jane Schoenbrun that they’ve essentially sliced out their soul and smeared it on the screen. Horror becomes a doorway to sexual liberation in Jane Schoenbrun’s meta-thriller starring Hannah Einbinder and an emboldened Gillian Anderson.

“Hacks’” Hannah Einbinder plays a rising director named Kris, a Sundance darling and Schoenbrun avatar of sorts who wants to convince a long-forgotten scream queen named Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) to star in her next movie. It’s a resurrection of the fictitious “Camp Miasma” franchise, a hack-’em-up about hormonal camp counselors slaughtered by a gender-bending, spear-wielding killer called Little Death, who has an air-conditioning vent for a face. (The reason why sort of makes sense when you see his lair.) Billy played the final girl in the 1983 original film, then disappeared. And so Kris heads out to Billy’s snowbound hideaway — which just so happens to be where the movie was shot.

Director Schoenbrun loves the movie-ness of movies. You can see their devotion in outdoor backdrops that are deliriously false, in sight gags that reference Cronenberg and Carpenter or in production design that includes the perfect nostalgic ’90s video store carpet. Inside Billy’s private movie theater, the projector beams down on the back of Anderson’s head like that infamous Nicole Kidman AMC promo. Maybe I’m loopy, but I’d even swear the entrance to Billy’s screening room has a handmade mural of the Roku City screensaver. Watch for clues when the storyline we’re watching becomes its own nested narrative.

From the second that Billy appears to greet Kris in Tivoli’s makeshift screening room, swanning into the frame with a femme fatale–friendly hat over her eyes and a Southern accent thicker than molasses in August, you can tell that the word “camp” is going to be pulling double duty here. Ditto the way Anderson makes a three-course meal of the phrase “dipping sauces,” condiments that get the same steamy treatment that strawberries did in 9 1/2 Weeks. Junk food is an aphrodisiac here, with KFC buckets and oodles of brightly colored brand-name candy acting as culinary counterparts to the junk cinema that’s activated something in the movie’s characters and its creator. Schoenbrun has talked about how the horror section of their local Blockbuster Video was like an orchard of forbidden fruit to them growing up, and the illicit thrill of indulging in things that might be “bad” for you permeates throughout Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Even the thesis-paper title spills into dangerous, hormonal territory.

Schoenbrun is a trans filmmaker, and you can feel how personal the notion of reconnection, identification, and liberation is for them in telling this tale. Yet the way they’ve artistically leveled up and used the moody aesthetic of the earlier works to craft a funny, unsettling, and ultimately emancipating work is exhilarating on all levels. It goes beyond being a paean to trash fandom, and transforms into something much deeper and grander. They have made their Miasma-sterpiece.