A director making a slasher sequel becomes obsessed with casting the original film’s ‘final girl,’ leading both women into psychological and sexual chaos.

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ is the latest film from Jane Schoenbrun, following the acclaimed ‘I Saw the TV Glow’. It sees Schoenbrun turn to the slasher genre, with Hannah Einbinder playing a young, socially conscious (or ‘woke’) filmmaker hired to revive a once popular but now decidedly problematic horror franchise for a modern audience. Her research brings her into contact with Gillian Anderson’s reclusive former scream queen, who starred in the original films and has spent the years since largely retreating from public life and now lives in the derelict set from the Camp Miasma series.

For large parts of the film it’s essentially a two-hander between Einbinder and Anderson, and they work really well together. Anderson is perfect as the ageing scream queen, while Einbinder is an equally good foil for her, with the differences between them feeding into the film’s ideas about horror, filmmaking and how attitudes have changed. It’s a bizarre and frequently very weird film, but that works in its favour, and even when I wasn’t entirely sure where it was going, I was interested in following it there.

One of the things I particularly loved was the amount of care and attention that has gone into creating the fictional ‘Camp Miasma’ franchise. That starts with an excellent opening credits sequence and continues throughout the film, with enough history and detail built around these fictional movies that they begin to feel like a real slasher series that you’ve somehow missed. Schoenbrun is clearly incredibly cinema literate, paying homage to the films and filmmakers that have influenced this in subtle and clever ways rather than simply pointing at references. It’s also an incredibly stylish and well-crafted film, with some unusual but effective music choices throughout. It had me almost immediately with a cover of R.E.M.’s ‘Nightswimming’ over the opening credits, while the unexpected use of Counting Crows during one of the film’s most memorable sequences worked equally well.

I suspect there are layers to ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ that I didn’t fully understand, but strangely that didn’t bother me too much. The strangeness of the film is a large part of its appeal, and even when I wasn’t completely on its wavelength, there was always something interesting going on. Anderson and Einbinder are excellent together, while Schoenbrun’s stylish direction and the sheer amount of detail put into the film made this a really enjoyable viewing experience.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Jane Schoenbrun

Starring: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler, Arthur Conti, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Dylan Baker, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Quintessa Swindell and Kevin McDonald

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt35298123/