Welcome to "Camp Miasma"
“Dealer’s choice.”
In the crates of DVDs and Blu-rays beside my desk, there’s a box set of the first eight Friday the 13th movies, from the original 1980 independent smash hit to the 1989, Vancouver-shot Jason Takes “Manhattan” (or downtown Vancouver’s then-new SkyTrain line). The original film was produced as an immediate response to John Carpenter’s Halloween. It was written in the summer of 1979, shot that September with a budget of $600 000, and released in theatres the following May. It was released in the heyday of the “slasher” as a subgenre, right when Reagan’s America took up arms against the sex and violence found in many Hollywood features, when the R rating was still supreme for mass-market action entertainment. From the time the first sequel came out in 1981, the series was already facing diminishing returns. When Part VIII rolled around in ‘89 (yes, they did eight movies in ten years, only missing ‘83 and ‘87), it only scraped $15 million on a $5 million budget, despite its use of the Expo Line and Granville Station. The series managed to eke out four more installments between 1993 and 2009, including a crossover with Nightmare on Elm Street, a sci-fi adventure, and a reboot, but has stalled out in the years since.
In my astute and fresh critical appraisal, Friday the 13th as a series is largely not good. They can often be entertaining in a rather psychotic way, and some are certainly better than others, but “quality horror cinema” is not a term I’d ascribe to any of the films, especially not when compared to the great treasure trove of more “serious and elevated” contemporary horror movies. The films often struggle to develop interesting characters, maintain energy between bursts of violence, fill their frames with anything resembling a compelling image or blocking (except for the stray split-diopter), or have anything in their craft of remote interest beyond some creatively executed murders. And now, forty-six years on, the violence seems rather cartoonish and silly. These movies, as do many of their ilk from the time period, live and die on shock value: namely overt sexuality and ultra-violence, the two great ever-present and eternal sins of culture. It was not the Friday the 13th series nor the other slasher hits of the late 70s and early 80s that awoke the desire for violence and carnality in the masses, but they made them cheap, predictable, and accessible. And yet, despite fully acknowledging that these movies are not good, I have the box set.
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| Photo via Mubi. |
In their approach to their “new kind of horror remake” (read: it’s not a remake at all), Jane Schoenbrun seems acutely aware that the Friday the 13th movies are bad. Well, in this case, it’s Camp Miasma, a series of fictional horror movies that are explicitly parodying the arc of the Friday films, including back-to-back sequels titled “The Final Chapter” and “A New Beginning” and one installment involving the series’ main killer heading to space. Schoenbrun’s very real film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma follows filmmaker Kris Williams (played by Hannah Einbinder, the Emmy Award winner from HBO’s Hacks), who’s been hired to make an “elevated” prequel/sequel to the long-dormant 1980s slasher series, Camp Miasma. As she works on her initial script draft, Kris heads up to the remote hills of the Pacific Northwest, a non-specific snow-covered landscape just south of Canada, to meet with Billy Presley (played by Gillian Anderson), a reclusive actress who played the “final girl” of the original movie. Kris discovers that despite her overt abandonment of fame and society, Billy can’t really move on from the movie she shot so many decades ago. In fact, she’s living at the summer camp where they shot the original. From there, things proceed to get as meta as you would expect.
Before I venture any deeper into the weeds of the film’s fabulous thematic content and characterization, I need to spend time discussing just how marvellous Camp Miasma is in its craft. The film is coated wall-to-wall in gorgeous, evocative imagery, including painted matte backdrops, in-camera visual effects and sleight-of-hand trickery, immaculate costuming, and stunning recreations of low-budget, late-century film grain aesthetics. Director Schoenbrun’s visual landscape here is more a half-remembered dream of films from four decades ago screening on hand-me-down CRT TVs, rather than a faithful recreation of the often drab visual palette of something like Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (which is a really ugly movie). The dreamy logic and tone of the film are built on the backbone of Eric Yue’s cinematography and indie darling Alex G’s spacey score. For those familiar with Schoenbrun’s previous work, like the nightmarish I Saw the TV Glow from a couple of years ago, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It evokes the same dreamy logic, but without the agonizing emptiness that permeates that early film. While the “Miasma” of the title might make the viewer think of something rather oppressive in the tone of this film, the atmosphere is quite the opposite. In fact, by the film’s end, the entire experience is downright euphoric.
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| Photo via Mubi. |
As the film progresses, Kris’ relationship with Billy turns from fandom to something far more symbiotic. Kris begins to sort through all of her messy relationship and personal baggage as the shell around Billy’s internalized isolationism begins to crack. The audience receives glimpses and scenes from the first Camp Miasma movie, primarily through Billy’s personal print. It follows a group of new camp counsellors headed up to the titular remote camp, including Billy as a young actress (played by Amanda Fix). The movie-within-the-movie’s cast is rounded out by Patrick Fischler, who’s here to parody the “You’re doomed!” scene from the first Friday movie, and Zach Cherry as one of the other counsellors on the trip. Just as the ghost stories say, the camp is stalked by a killer named “Little Death” (played by Jack Haven), a gender-queer former camper who was drowned by his fellow students, who’s out for revenge against the camp staff who hurt him — a portmanteau of Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees and Sleepaway Camp’s Angela Baker. As Kris correctly identifies, it’s the transphobic legacy of a plethora of horror films that use trans identity as a shorthand for killer monstrosity (a throughline of Kris’s in-universe work as a filmmaker), while the present-day Billy deflects the critique as just some “gender trouble.”
I left my screening of Camp Miasma thinking about a different slasher-adjacent film, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). In that film, Michael Caine plays a psychiatrist who, surprise surprise, turns out to be a mentally unstable transgender woman who turns to murder. While Hitchcock, De Palma’s spiritual father, is brought up explicitly in the actual action of the film, I can’t shake the specificity of De Palma’s often leering camera, which is used both as a way to bait and hook the audience and to unravel his tales of criminal suspense. While Hitchcock and De Palma are perhaps the most obvious filmmakers when thinking about gaze (Laura Mulvey, who popularized the term “the male gaze,” has a lot to say about the former), their DNA has certainly infected the slasher genre, especially with many crediting Hitchcock’s Psycho as one of the first true slasher movies. The gaze is a tool to revel in “flesh and fluids,” as Billy so aptly puts it. Many slashers, including Friday the 13th, literalize the gaze with the frequent use of POV shots of a killer stalking his prey through the trees or the suburbs, offering tantalizing glimpses of the perversity. De Palma and his runaway distant cousins of the 80s slasher kick allow the audience to enjoy the voyeuristic, scopophilic impulses of their lenses, before ultimately undercutting them with a morality tale. Purity wins in the end. The sinful teenagers and the murderous psychos are rightly punished.
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| Photo via Mubi. |
Schoenbrun does two critical things with these source texts. First, they tackle the transphobia head-on. While the film isn’t as explicitly focused on the transgender experience as I Saw the TV Glow is, Camp Miasma quickly names the injustice. But more than just commenting on its predecessors’ more problematic social views, Schoenbrun is chiefly interested in understanding the gaze at the heart of those other movies. Old slasher movies, as people far more intelligent than me have discussed to death, have a lot of hang-ups. The often teenage protagonists are seen indulging in drinking, partying, bullying, drugs, and premarital relations, which are subsequently punished for their moral decay by the movie’s killer (this is quite literally a plot point in The Cabin in the Woods). The “gaze” of the killer is not only leering, but perhaps morally upright. But instead of letting the “gaze” of the film’s killer, Little Death, simply function as both leering voyeurism and moral judge over the film’s characters (hardly teenagers anymore at Einbinder’s 31 and Anderson’s 58). Eventually, by the film’s remarkable finale, the “gaze” of Little Death becomes the source of liberation and reconciliation with the body. The body isn’t something that is objectified anymore, either as an object for murder or as an object of desire in the viewer, but as something whole and complete on the character’s terms.
Kris, like the genre she’s obsessed with, has a lot of hang-ups around her internalized notions of intimacy. She struggles to maintain a connection with her primary partner and seems content to follow the whims of thoughtless polyamory. She buries herself in her work, which she can’t comprehend her own sense of identity without, which Billy is quick to call her out on. Hannah Einbinder’s performance as Kris is fabulous, as is her counterpart, Gillian Anderson’s Billy. This core dynamic anchors the film in a tender, comedic love story. Kris’ arc is that of self-discovery, pushing through the weeds of her own messy insecurities, as Billy comes to terms with the legacy of her younger years and the strange relationship she has with the camp. Eventually, the story of Little Death becomes a tool for liberation for the two women. Camp Miasma reflects a theme uniting all of Schoenbrun’s work: modern popular media as the basis for understanding one’s own identity. Kris, despite all of the series’ uncomfortable 1980s trappings, can’t help but love the Camp Miasma movies, even building a new understanding of herself through the images on screen. The box set is still sitting in the crate.
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| Photo via Mubi. |
There’s something to the very long and certainly provocative title, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, that immediately confronts the collective fears and discomforts around both sexuality and death. Sexuality and death are the two impulses that, in many ways, are the impetus of most of culture, but are specifically the impetus of these middle-aged slasher movies. They’re conflated in these inspirational texts, which Schoenbrun enjoys exploring. Part of Camp Miasma’s strength as a film is that it pulls these sorts of overarching themes of gaze, violence, and sexuality out of the subtext and into the direct narrative thrust of the film, making its reinterpretation and reevaluation of the genre’s beliefs an integral part of the experience. It’s critical of the past, while also working as a rather effective love letter to that era of slasher horror entertainment in its eternal quest to redeem what was once there. The final result is utterly remarkable and spellbinding. Schoenbrun deftly constructed flavours of campy, nostalgic imagination, dreamy visual flourishes, and effective moments of horror, all in service of a genuinely touching story of self-realization. It’s a dazzling array of hazy memories, half-recalled dreams, emergent love, and a bit of little death.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in theatres.
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