Teenage Sex and Death as Camp Miasma: Queer Joy, But Make It Spooky
Fans of We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024) will be excited for director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest vibrant acid trip. Winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes, Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma confronts a paradox of the horror genre: it's traditionally loved by women and queer people. It’s also entrenched with misogyny and transphobia. So how do we reconcile all the joy, shame, and tension? Schoenbrun brings out that tangled mess and shines a kaleidoscopic light through it.
In the film, classic horror franchise Camp Miasma is set to return and young director Kris Williams has been hired to helm the reboot. Like many horrors, it’s pretty outdated, so the producers are hoping Kris can reinvent it for a modern audience. Kris’s first port of call is to hire the actress from the original film, Billy Presley. Billy’s enthusiastic about the new project, but she has become a recluse who lives on the set of the original film and is obsessed with the fictional killer. What could go wrong?
Billy is played by Gillian Anderson, a horror icon with a huge queer fanbase. She’s also known for talking openly about desire, publishing a collection of anonymous sexual fantasies (Want, 2024) and playing a sex therapist in Sex Education. The ‘meta world’ of the film, then, reflects her own career. Her X-Files past also makes her a perfect fit for Schoenbrun’s work, which often focuses on nerd culture and how queerness intersects with fandom.
Camp Miasma treats supernatural media not just as pure escapism, but as something transformative. It allows us to confront ideas that might frighten us in a context that’s fun and comprehensible. It presents a realm of possibilities, not just about other-wordly entities, but about society's rigid ideas of identity and liberation. All of which goes a way to explaining why women and queer people have been drawn to it for so long.
Is it really just ‘escapist fiction’ if it bleeds into the way we think and feel? What happens when the boundaries begin to blur? At Camp Miasma, there's tons of bleeding and blurring as the on-screen horror makes its way into reality. But despite all the murder and whatnot... would it be all that bad?
Written by Jodie Passey
