Here’s one for all the kids who were exposed to lurid slasher movies when they were way too young and it kinda messed them up… but they’re finally ready to laugh about it.
Jane Schoenbrun’s latest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is shocking, emotional, provocative, numbing, warm, witty, and surreal. It’s a slasher nerd’s dream, with a David Fincher-esque attention to detail in the opening sequence, which was designed using insights gathered from horror convention-goers. Written to indulge superfans, the movie also makes sure to not lose the general audience. Just as the geeky navel-gazing threatens to become tedious, a joke or a wink keeps the audience laughing and focused on the fantastical story Schoenbrun actually wants to tell—which isn’t a genuine slasher at all.
The movie follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer film director tasked with creating a “woke” reboot of a politically incorrect sleepaway camp franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th. On her way to meet the reclusive final girl from the original Camp Miasma film—Billy Preston, portrayed deliciously by a junk food-obsessed Gillian Anderson—Kris fails to nail her pitch and instead gets yanked into a fantasy buried deep in her psyche while at the abandoned set where Billy now lives.
The movie is very personal for Schoenbrun, who told NPR that they grew up watching films like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare On Elm Street and feel like they know slasher movies “so, so deeply.” Just as they did with their prior film, I Saw the TV Glow, their goal with creating the Camp Miasma franchise within the film was to tap into the intense emotions of being a kid developing an obsession with an entertainment property that’s not intended for their eyes. In Kris’ case, that obsession was with Camp Miasma, its tortured villain Little Death, and the oversexualized victims who ended up on the other end of Little Death’s spear, terrible sequel after terrible sequel.
Matte paintings add to the fantasy
The film’s production designers, Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland, explained in recent interviews that Schoenbrun wanted the movie’s visuals to be as emotionally charged as the subject matter. From the outset, Schoenbrun asked the designers to look to old moviemaking tricks for inspiration to make the landscapes at the Camp Miasma set as dreamy and immersive as the director envisioned. To achieve this, the designers decided to revive an old pre-CGI technique called matte painting. The only problem, they said, was that no one alive knew exactly how the filmmakers of the ’60s got the technique to work.