Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Nocturnal strand

As a maven of pop-culture detritus, American director Jane Schoenbrun’s campground of twisted delights is a heady, horny headtrip of the highest order.

The cinema of Jane Schoenbrun is full of director surrogates, but few have felt closer to home than Kris (Hannah Einbender), an emerging filmmaker whose sexual frustration is reflected in her rigourously academic approach to her work, a worldview which is upended when she is hired to ‘reinvigorate’ the musty carcass of ‘70s slasher franchise Camp Miasma, whose influence has waned in the wake of endless shoddy sequels and cash-ins.

Hoping to glean insights on how to tell a new story in this universe, Kris seeks out the original film’s final girl, Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), a seductive recluse who lives in the hollowed-out set where she once found cinema stardom. Snowed in, Kris and Billy find their attraction spiralling into psychosexual mania as the line between reality and Miasma blurs.

Schoenbrun’s attempt at the ‘sleepover classic’, Camp Miasma is at once hugely transgressive and invitingly cosy. As Kris finds freedom from over-intellectualising in the sublimity of sexual liberation, Schoenbrun takes their place as one of America’s most important young filmmakers, succeeding I Saw the TV Glow’s devastating lament for the life unlived for a mesmeric ode to horniness and matching your own freak.