RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Hannah Einbinder as Kris in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma —Courtesy of Mubi
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The last thing Kris Williams ( Hannah Einbinder ) does before she dies is watch herself do it. She lies on a twin bed in Camp Tivoli’s Bunk 5, candles burning around her, rose petals scattered across the sheets, while Billy Presley ( Gillian Anderson ) stretches out on top of her and coaches her toward the end. “You’re almost there now,” she says. “You’re almost dead.” Billy tells Kris to watch herself through the killer’s eyes, and the film obliges: The camera slips out of the cabin and into Little Death’s helmet as he climbs the steps, breath ragged, spear in hand.
What follows is impalement and orgasm in the same instant—one spear through both women, blood passing from Billy’s mouth onto Kris’s upturned face—and when their breathing stops, the hole at the bottom of the lake pushes out a fresh videotape.
That tape, and the women’s smiles in the film’s final moments, hold the keys to Jane Schoenbrun’s latest feature Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma : a horror comedy, a love story, and the most sexually direct film of their career. It follows Kris, a young queer director hired to reboot the moldering Camp Miasma slasher franchise, as she tracks down its original final girl, Billy, who now resides at the abandoned camp where the movies were shot. Kris’ trip turns into a courtship, and the courtship into something the film doesn’t quite spell out, though Schoenbrun will name what it’s chasing. “It’s a movie about getting out of your head and getting into your body,” they tell TIME.
Schoenbrun realized they were trans while writing the 2021 release We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and began physically transitioning after finishing it. Where that film and its 2024 follow-up, I Saw the TV Glow , grew out of the frightening early days of coming out and transitioning, this one, Schoenbrun says, “came from the fun parts” of their transition—a period when, “for the first time, I think, since childhood, it felt like the world around me was real.”
Kris begins the film investigating desire the only way she knows how: academically, through film theory, a method that has not met with much success thus far in her personal life. “By the end of the movie, the only way she’s able to actually do that is with her whole body, by embracing the flesh and fluids of it all,” Schoenbrun says. The surest way to understand the film’s transcendent final moments is to approach it the way Kris does: from the beginning.
Who gets to watch whom
Kris taking in a Miasma movie —Courtesy of Mubi
The film settles in early on with Kris alone in a hotel bed, a bucket of popcorn and Raisinets in hand, watching Camp Miasma Part VI: A New Beginning and writing the word “Desire” in her notebook, underlined twice. “People giggle at it,” Schoenbrun says. “What a pretentious, film-school-y thing to do.” The character, they add, is “a bit of a funhouse mirror” of them. The sequel Kris falls asleep to ends with a bloodied final girl refusing a cop’s reassurance that the killer is gone. It’s never over, she says, warning that “he’s still down there at the bottom of the lake” and “still hungry.”
Kris continues driving to Camp Tivoli to court Billy for an appearance in her film. Billy, for her part, vanished from acting directly following the first Miasma movie and now lives on the property: crafting, sketching, and painting. Their first encounter sets the terms for everything to follow. In the camp’s Cinema building, an old projector flickers to life on the scene where young Billy (Amanda Fix) loses her virginity, and the real Billy materializes behind Kris, hoping for a jump. “It’s only fair, right?” she says. “You’ve already seen me.” Kris has spent a lifetime studying this woman’s most exposed moment on a screen; Billy answers by watching her back.
That exchange starts an open question of power between the two, and their sensual fried-chicken dinner is the first round of the negotiation. Kris arrives with what Schoenbrun calls her “whole spiel down pat.” Billy “sees right through it” and needles her “in a way that gives her power in that dynamic.” “Well, you remade Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain,” she says of Kris’s feature debut film. Eventually, Billy correctsKris’s theories with just three words: The original Camp Miasma was never about monstrosity or gender trouble so much as simply “flesh and fluids.”
On the cabin wall behind them hangs a vintage poster bearing the franchise’s old tagline: “If it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” A leftover Billy says she’s kept from the home-video campaign. From there, Schoenbrun says, the two spend the movie “yes, and-ing” each other—the comedy improvisation principle of accepting a partner’s offer in a scene and building on it—a courtship built on daring one another to admit what they want.
The tagline on the poster
A young Billy (left), played by Amanda Fix —Courtesy of Mubi
That night, with the fire burning and the snacks close by, the film’s tagline gets put to the test. Smoking a joint in front of the mirror, Kris glimpses the young boy Little Death used to be, the bullied camper who, by franchise lore, was drowned in the lake. She emerges blissfully stoned, flirts with Billy, then confesses an intimate truth she has never told anyone: She can only approach pleasure by leaving herself, imagining her way into an old slasher film, becoming either the bookworm in Camp Miasma: Part II , or the girl in the outhouse in Camp Miasma: Part IV , or even young Billy in bed with that look in her eye.
She calls it dissociation, stupid and misogynistic. It’s all just play, Billy assures her, and if it gets too real, you can always turn it off. Then she urges Kris’s gaze up at the Little Death mannequin looming over the room and tells her to look into his eyes and make them her own. “Let’s ma...
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