“Silly enough to become a sleeper hit, while clever enough to attract a similar cult following to Schoenbrun’s previous film.”

“I feel like there’s about to be a jump scare.”

Just a few days ago I received an email from Meta about their activities at Cannes, which included some VR thing. I half suspect this ‘thing’ is Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, the ’80s slasher spoof Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It’s certainly meta enough (get it, wink wink?), and the film makes you believe that we are all living in a movie reality created by a monster (is this Mark Zuckerberg then?), not our own reality. Schoenbrun hasn’t lost their knack for referencing not only a plethora of pop culture moments and old movies, but even themselves. Throw in a handful (cheekful?) of tongue-in-cheek digs at the Hollywood machine and the movie industry’s fakeness at a place where that fakeness reaches peak level, and you have an acerbic little horror flick about sexual release and the art of becoming someone else that is silly enough to become a sleeper hit, while clever enough to attract a similar cult following to Schoenbrun’s previous film I Saw the TV Glow.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder, best known for her role in TV comedy Hacks) is an aspiring film director, propped up by Hollywood to be the latest big thing. Her next project: a reboot of a slasher series from the ’80s and ’90s. The series’ extremely popular original started a craze, leading to brand deals, collectables, and the inevitable downgrade with each new entry into its canon. Schoenbrun lays out this backstory without much exposition in the film’s opening sequence through a barrage of film memorabilia and newspaper cuttings. It’s up to Kris to breathe new life into, or rather generate more shareholder revenue from, the series, and to do so she heads out to the Pacific Northwest. It’s Lynch land, with Douglas firs aplenty and Patrick Fischler behind the gas station counter channeling the late master. In other words, a perfect setting for something unsettling. Kris is hoping to meet Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), star of the original Camp Miasma film, who turned down the inevitable sequel and mysteriously faded into obscurity. As you do in films like this, she now lives in the original sleepover camp that her one claim to fame was set in, and she’s not quite ready for her close-up yet (even the characters in the film see the similarity to Norma Desmond, Southern drawl and all). No, first she wants to tease out Kris’s intentions for the new movie. And tease she does, slowly drawing the nerdy but prudish Kris out of her sexual shell, a shell that she is dying to escape but doesn’t know how; the polyamorous relationship that she is in seems more like a setup for her girlfriend to have her cake and eat it too. When there is a serial killer by the name of Little Death who might still be roaming around the doomed camp, it’s pretty clear where this story is heading.

Schoenbrun plays a lot with the fake and the real, from matte paintings of the camp to the film’s final slasher sequences in which Kris has the out-of-body experience she so desires in order to undergo the ‘little death’. It is also a rather blatant reference to transitioning; in the back story to Little Death, as told by one of the characters in the film-within-a-film that is the original Camp Miasma, we learn that the killer was a boy who floated between male and female identity, and was bullied and eventually killed for it (their serial killer incarnation is played by Jack Haven). “This part is transphobic,” Kris remarks to Billy as they are watching an original print at the aging star’s in-camp movie house, a sly dig where Schoenbrun themself seems to be both wanting and eating the cake. There are several other such moments in the film where their acidic dialogue rips the movie industry a new one (look out for a hilarious Dylan Baker as an executive who only thinks in dollar signs), while at the same time being produced by MUBI and Plan B. The jabs are playful but true enough; they do raise the question if Schoenbrun is the killer inside the house or the next victim who has fallen to Hollywood’s slashing ways. The executives at the aforementioned companies should take the joke on the chin, because with the right marketing Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma could be a hit (this film oddly enough has A24 written all over it, but so be it). With all its pop references, often very on the nose (playing Sade’s ‘No Ordinary Love’ during Einbinder and Anderson’s final sex scene is a choice), Gen Z will eat it up. Whether that makes the film actually good is a different matter. Just spoofing the serial killer schlock genre alone doesn’t elevate your film above that level, but Schoenbrun layers in enough thematic material about (sexual) identity and becoming who you truly are to have more discerning audiences mull over the subtext while the teenagers enjoy the fountains of blood and the in-jokes.