Across their three feature films as a director, Jane Schoenbrun has used the iconography and visual language of horror films to chart their transition, and their changing relationship with their body. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, they were a floating head, fully dissociated from their physical form; in I Saw the TV Glow, the proverbial egg-crack moment is met with raw fear, then an acknowledgement that staying closeted is actually the far more terrifying option. In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the filmmaker returns to their body, rewiring their relationship with pleasure in the process.
This intimate narrative is translated through the carnal appeal of slasher movies — “flesh and fluids,” as the film’s reclusive retired scream queen Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) puts it. Although it does feature some satisfyingly squishy moments, on the whole, the “sex” side of the equation is more prominent than the “death” one: This is an erotic dramedy in drag as an ‘80s slasher movie, told through the framework of a story about a queer filmmaker trying to craft a remake of a “problematic classic.” It’s very heady, and very in its head — dissociation, specifically during sex, is still a key element here — and its abstract elements do sometimes get in the way of the primal meat-on-meat aspects of a slasher movie. But when it all connects? Oh, baby.
