Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink. As before with Schoenbrun’s films, I found myself thinking of Gore Vidal’s (still unfashionable) Myra Breckinridge novel.
This is a film that somehow persuades you that the 80s slasher genre is an exalting and liberatingly progressive experience. As before, in her We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Schoenbrun pulls off the trick of inventing an imaginary media phenomenon and treating it with complete fan-seriousness – an online horror game and cult scary TV show in the first two films and now a slasher movie franchise called Camp Miasma about a teen transgender killer called Little Death wearing a ceiling vent as a mask (why is never explained) who periodically emerges from a lake in a sleepaway camp where scantily clad young people will be brutally speared.
The opening credits wittily walk us through the franchise’s initial wild success and slump in the later movies, the merch and the video games and the insufferable cultural studies discourse about its “problematic” treatment of gender.
Now young indie film-maker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been hired to direct a lucrative origin-story reboot of Camp Miasma, a dream job as she has been obsessed with this series since illicitly watching the first movie at the age of eight, thrilled by feelings she still can’t understand by the Final Girl’s mortal jeopardy, preparing to die while somehow experiencing the killer’s point-of-view: feelings that Kris’s unhappy, painful experiences with sex have never equalled.
Now she has to persuade that iconic Final Girl from the first film to be in it – the star who quit after that and never acted in any subsequent episode or any film at all, a recluse like Norma Desmond or a very self-possessed Shelley Duvall. She is Billy Presley, a worldly connoisseur of junk food, snacks and sex fantasy, played with droll style and soignée sexiness by Gillian Anderson.
Kris has to visit Billy in person to make her pitch and is disconcerted to discover that she actually lives in the remote disused sleepaway camp that was used as a location for the first film, in which she has built a mini screening room for repeatedly watching a 35mm print of her film. Billy’s elegant, seductive manner disturbs and yet excites poor Kris.
As for Billy, she is amused at Kris’s earnest description of her queer polyamory but baffled and irritated when Kris invokes Judith Butler in talking about her plans to reclaim Camp Miasma. When they sit down to watch the film together, Billy indulges Kris’s excitable comments on a great “split diopter” shot – foreground and background faces in equal dreamlike sharp focus as in Brian de Palma’s Carrie – and in fact Schoenbrun gives us a split diopter shot of her own at the end.
But Billy has something terrible or wonderful to reveal about shooting the virginity loss scene in Camp Miasma and Kris becomes convinced that the two of them are not alone in this camp. Billy is secretly talking to someone. Could that someone be living at the bottom of the lake? Is the slasher in the square ceiling vent mask the equivalent of Erich von Stroheim’s butler in Sunset Boulevard? Is Camp Miasma … gulp … real?
Well, perhaps the point is that it’s real in the sense that liberating, escapist fantasy is real – real in the way that boring reality isn’t real. Or perhaps the reality resides in collapsing the distinction between real and unreal. Camp Miasma is strange and eccentric, but carried off with commitment and even passion.