FILM OF THE WEEK: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Everyone remembers the horror film they saw just a little too young. Not necessarily the plot, but the feeling - a kill, scream, or image that lodged itself deep in your body before you were old enough to understand why it affected you so profoundly. In much the same way, people remember the first actor they fancied, the first sex scene they weren't supposed to watch and ended up rewinding when their parents were out, the first time cinema stirred something confusing and exhilarating inside them.

Jane Schoenbrun knows that horror and sex have always shared the same cinematic bloodstream.

As someone who spent years studying horror and gender in cinema, I happily disappeared down that academic rabbit hole for years. Slasher films have long been obsessed with bodies (particularly women's bodies) and sexualising the kill. Women in slasher films are often killed by penetration – they’re stabbed, impaled, injected, and chased through forests as their clothes tear and their screams become almost orgasmic. Men, in contrast, are more often dispatched with blunt force, their kills brutal but shorter, less lingered upon. The genre has always encoded ideas about sexuality into violence, lessons about respectability and appropriate behaviour into who gets killed. We know the trope: the girl who has sex dies first, and the virgin survives. We learned rules about sex through horror long before many of us consciously realised we were learning them.

We learned rules about gender too. Who was allowed to survive. Who was punished for transgression. Who became the monster.

Some of horror's most iconic villains have always carried gender transgression within them, sometimes explicitly and intentionally, sometimes in the undercurrents of their character: Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees. Many of these portrayals were undeniably problematic, yet for generations of queer audiences they also became unexpected sites of identification, of recognition. When mainstream culture offers you almost no reflections of yourself, monsters can become mirrors.

Tall of these contradictory, impactful, and fascinating cultural scripts are exactly what Jane Schoenbrun explores in the extraordinary Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – all in their trademark style, humour and flourish.

After the critical success of the astonishing I Saw the TV Glow, which used TV to explore a character’s experience of realising they were trans and the disassociation that can come from finally discovering yourself, Camp Miasma is about what comes afterwards: reconnecting with your body, your desire, your pleasure and your imagination.

The film opens with the idea of cultural memory via a brilliant analogue collage chronicling the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, laying out VHS sleeves, newspaper headlines, moral panics, merchandise, increasingly ridiculous sequels, critical backlash and inevitable reboots. Accompanied by the sound of R.E.M’s ‘Nightswimming’, it charts not only the life cycle of a horror series but the entire machinery of Hollywood itself: where everything is flogged to within an inch of its life, resurrected, and sold again.

Into this cultural swamp walks Kris, played beautifully by Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder. Kris is a Sundance darling whose breakthrough film recreated Psycho's shower scene from the perspective of the shower curtain – the kind of hilarious, self-awarely performative and utterly specific detail that Schoenbrun excels at. Kris is intellectually brilliant, deeply self-conscious, endlessly analytical – and so she’s smart enough to know when she’s being used. Hired to revive an ageing and problematic horror franchise and make it ‘woke’ enough for moder audiences, Kris is under no allusions about why she’s been offered the franchise. Her hope is that by seeking out Billy Presley, the original scream queen who vanished after making the first Camp Miasma, she might be able to make something genuinely special.

As Billy, queer icon Gillian Anderson is sensational here, delivering one of the year's most unexpectedly funny performances; a glamorous, off beat eccentric seemingly deigned to pull Kris out of her sexually disengaged shell.

Schoenbrun's visual imagination remains astonishing. As in I Saw the TV Glow, they embrace beautiful, painterly artificiality, where forests look like theatre sets and colours pulse with dreamy intensity. In this world, Billy lives on the very set where the original film was shot, further collapsing the boundary between fiction and life. As Kris and Billy embark on a sexual exploration, and the secrets of Camp Miasma’ lake are revealed, the film explores all the things we try to bury but that always rise to the surface: sex, fear, shame, desire, and memory.

Billy describes slashers and “flesh and fluids” and Schoenbrun delights in showing both. Limbs are severed, blood erupts in spectacular geysers, the body becomes a cocoon of fleshy walls to hide in. It’s all wonderfully playful - yes, it’s grotesque but also weird, dreamy, camp, funny – and importantly, performative, in the way sexuality and desire often are, too.

A standout scene sees Kris and Billy discuss slasher films and desire, Kris explaining how in horror films, the camera’s POV often shifts, putting the viewer in position of both villain and victim, the position of experiencing the world as both hunter and prey, as all genders. It’s a brilliant way of exploring how films teach us how to experience gender and desire – and for all its intellectual rigour and analyses, also manages to be obscenely sexy. Who knew film theory could be foreplay? (I did.)

The film is also consistently hilarious. Einbinder brings the same razor-sharp comic timing that made her a star in Hacks, perfectly capturing Kris' endless overthinking and awkward sincerity. Anderson appears to be having the time of her life, and Schoenbrun fills the film with slasher references, visual jokes and affectionate nods that horror fans will delight in unpacking.

Schoenbrun has not only made a great slasher. They’ve made a sharp satire of Hollywood's reboot machine; a deeply queer romance; a meditation on the trans experience and female desire; a love letter to horror fandom; and one of the smartest films ever made about the complicated relationship between cinema and identity. It's gory, hilarious, sensual, moving and endlessly inventive.

Go visit Camp Miasma. Dive into the dark depths of the lake. See what you are when you emerge.

• Out now. Watch the trailer below: