The Bloody Ecstasy of Being Seen

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is not so much a horror movie as it is a resurrection. Director Jane Schoenbrun approaches the slasher film as a site of queer desire, and in doing so attempts to expose the bloody ecstasy underneath. But the film also poses a more difficult question: What do we do with the problematic legacy of the horror movies of the 1970s and ‘80s, where gender and sexuality were so often punished for the bloodthirsty thrill of a rising body count? Rather than simply condemning those movies or rehabilitating them for modern audiences, Camp Miasma suggests that in order to confront the problem, we first have to wrestle with why we desired these movies in the first place. The result is a kind of queer recognition that occurs not through clarity but through misrecognition.

There is a contradiction in that history that Schoenbrun understands intimately. To see some distorted version of yourself onscreen can still mean being seen. Horror’s monsters, final girls, doomed teenagers, masked killers, and social outcasts created spaces in which identities forbidden elsewhere could become enormous. Desire could be dangerous. Gender could become unstable. Bodies could transform. The very qualities that mainstream culture treated as threatening were the qualities horror depended upon to survive.

In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the queer protagonist is no longer simply the killer or the prey; they are, in some sense, both. That inversion opens a new portal into the horror genre, one where seeing yourself is no longer an either/or proposition but something unstable, seductive, and transformational. Schoenbrun is less interested in correcting the sins of the slasher movie than in crawling inside its carcass to discover what still lives there.

Under Schoenbrun’s watchful eye, that contradiction is dragged into the present. The movie centers on a filmmaker tasked with resurrecting the Camp Miasma franchise, a relic of an earlier era of exploitation filmmaking whose pleasures have become increasingly difficult to separate from its politics. The assignment is familiar to anyone watching the modern entertainment industry cannibalize its own history: take something old, problematic, and commercially recognizable and somehow reinvent it for a contemporary audience. But what initially appears to be a satire about reboot culture gradually becomes something stranger. Reinventing Miasma means confronting not only what the franchise was, but what it meant to the people who loved it. Nostalgia becomes less an escape into the past than a confrontation with it.

That tension is especially suited to Schoenbrun, whose previous films are fantastical allegories about how television, movies, and the internet can become gateways to the self. Popular culture is never merely a distraction in their work. It is a mirror, a prism, and sometimes a trapdoor: a place where people can glimpse versions of themselves that everyday life has taught them to suppress. Their characters do not simply watch media; they become entangled with it. The screen offers the possibility that somewhere behind the shame and regret accumulated over a lifetime there is another self-waiting to emerge.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma pushes that idea directly into the slasher movie. Through a deliberately self-conscious lens, Schoenbrun makes guilt and shame part of the body count. These, too, are things that must be decimated if we are ever going to become the people we were meant to be. The violence therefore operates on two levels at once. It retains the lurid pleasure of the genre while becoming an act of psychic demolition. The bodies pile up, but so do old assumptions about who is allowed to desire, who is allowed to be desired, and what kinds of bodies are permitted to survive the night.

Schoenbrun shows their genre bona fides by setting a slashing sequence to Counting Crows, a choice that is both pungently ironic and strangely sincere. Pop music has always consummated our lives: the first kiss, the bedroom, the breakup, the drive home, and, in horror movies, sometimes a victim’s final breath. The collision of familiar music with physical violence gets at something essential about Schoenbrun’s project. Nostalgia is comforting until it isn’t. Pop culture does not merely accompany memory; it cuts into it.

The film is anchored by two uproarious performances that further undermine the boundaries through which we have learned to understand this codified queer language. Hannah Einbinder plays the filmmaker tasked with reinventing the problematic Miasma property into something newly palatable for the masses, but her performance refuses the easy posture of enlightened modernity looking backward at an embarrassing past. Einbinder is too fascinated, too implicated, too turned on by the material for that. She approaches the old film with the skepticism of someone who knows precisely what is wrong with it and the hunger of someone who cannot quite surrender what it gave her. That tension creates a fissure between critique and desire, between knowing better and still wanting to look. And looking is crucial to Schoenbrun’s cinema.

The queer gaze here is not purified simply because it belongs to a queer filmmaker or character. Einbinder’s performance keeps destabilizing our sense of who possesses the gaze and who is trapped inside it. At different moments she resembles director, spectator, final girl, voyeur, and potential victim. The categories begin bleeding into one another. If the old slasher depended upon a relatively stable arrangement, the camera looks, the woman is looked at, the killer punishes, the audience enjoys, Schoenbrun allows Einbinder to move restlessly between those positions. She does not escape the machinery of the genre. She contaminates it.

But the real scene-stealer is Gillian Anderson, whom Schoenbrun’s camera covets like a white rose. Cloaked in the decaying glamour of a poor man’s Norma Desmond, Anderson enters carrying an entire vocabulary of familiar signs: faded starlet, horror hag, camp diva, object of desire, survivor. In another movie, any one of those identities would be enough to contain her. Anderson refuses containment. What initially registers as delicious caricature gradually becomes funny, guarded, wounded, tender, and finally almost reverential.

That distinction matters because camp has historically offered queer audiences a language for recognizing one another while remaining partially concealed from the culture looking back at us. The exaggerated gesture, the grand dame, the doomed beauty, the monstrous woman: these figures could communicate something that could not always be spoken directly. Anderson knows how to perform those codes, but she also knows how to undermine them. A glance held a fraction too long or an unexpectedly vulnerable delivery opens a crack in the archetype. Suddenly we are not merely laughing at the faded horror actress or worshipping her as an icon. We are confronted with the person who had to survive becoming one.

This is where Anderson and Einbinder become essential to Schoenbrun’s larger argument. Their performances occupy opposite ends of a queer cinematic inheritance: the younger artist who believes she can remake the image and the older woman who has already lived inside it. Yet Schoenbrun gradually collapses that distance. One cannot simply rescue the other. Anderson is not merely the damaged artifact of an unenlightened past, and Einbinder is not the enlightened queer present arriving to set her free. Each recognizes something in the other that destabilizes the role she has been assigned.

Killer becomes victim; victim becomes voyeur; actress becomes author; director becomes fan; object of desire begins returning the gaze. Schoenbrun understands that queer spectatorship has often flourished inside precisely these fissures. The coded language may have been limiting, even destructive, but we became extraordinarily fluent in it. That is why Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma cannot simply reject the slasher’s problematic history. To discard those images wholesale would mean pretending they never provided pleasure, recognition, or even refuge. The more interesting act is to seize control of their instability and discover what else those images might be capable of becoming.

This is ultimately what makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma more than another clever deconstruction of the slasher movie. Schoenbrun is not standing safely outside the genre, pointing at everything previous generations got wrong. They are standing inside it, covered in its blood, asking why we came here in the first place. For queer audiences especially, that question has no simple answer. Horror offered monstrosity when we wanted humanity, death when we wanted a future, and closets when we wanted open doors.

Perhaps that is why resurrection is a better word for Camp Miasma than reinvention. Schoenbrun does not sanitize the corpse. They bring it back and force us to look again, at its ugliness, its pleasures, its shame, and its desire. More importantly, they allow the corpse to look back. In that exchange, the old distinction between killer and prey finally begins to collapse. Queerness no longer occupies one side of the knife. It exists in the dangerous space between the person holding it, the person watching it descend, and the person in the darkened theater who cannot quite explain why they want to keep looking.