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This article contains mild spoilers for “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.”

In the seminal 1996 slasher, “Scream,” Jamie Kennedy’s Randy Meeks famously breaks down the core “rules” for surviving a slasher film. You may not survive the movie if you have sex. You may not survive the movie if you drink or do drugs. You may not survive the movie if you say “I’ll be right back”, “Hello?” or “Who’s there?” These fundamental truths are self-evident when it comes to what is arguably horror’s most prolific subgenre, and have shaped the general public’s understanding of how a slasher film functions. The “Scream” sequels expanded to more rules, but these guidelines were always a blueprint for survival, not insight into what a slasher film is on a fundamental level.

At their core, slasher films are morality tales, or stories that teach a clear lesson about right and wrong/good and evil, operating by a strict code of survival where those who break the rules are punished, and only the pure survive. But purity is subjective, and therefore each film needs a barometer. Enter: the Final Girl, the last surviving character to confront the killer, the one left to tell the story and therefore — the film’s moral compass. The term “final girl” was first coined by Carol J. Clover and expanded upon in her seminal 1992 text, “Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.” While Clover’s examination of gender in slasher cinema is admittedly a bit overreliant on Freudian psychology, her observations have become unspoken canon with every slasher film produced since.

Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” knows this to be true and brings the exploratory subtext of gender and sexuality within the subgenre and makes it text.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is as subtle as its fictional franchise slasher Little Death’s harpoon penetrating a camp counselor, with promising queer director Kris (the always phenomenal Hannah Einbinder) often waxing poetic about the “true meaning” of slasher films, loaded with meta commentary about the genre that often sounds pulled directly from a Letterboxd review. For anyone who has engaged with even a modicum of horror scholarship in the last 30 years, the points the film makes regarding gender, sexuality, and the pain/joy that often comes with figuring out where we “fit” within these spectrums — “Camp Miasma” isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know and haven’t already agonized over ourselves.

For some, seeing this reflected back through the surrealist funhouse mirror of Jane Schoenbrun’s blending of reality and media will be incredibly validating, but for others, there might be a tinge of annoyance that well-worn academic themes that have been studied extensively for decades are being presented as if fire has been discovered. But the average person has not thought about the deeper meaning of slasher films and their connection to society, so “Camp Miasma” has the benefit of providing a playground for viewers to recontextualize their own relationship with the genre, and therefore, themselves. 

After all, Carol J. Clover posited that slasher films use the final girl to make audiences feel. Once Kris connects with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson doing her Norma Desmond finest), the actress who played the final girl in the first “Camp Miasma” film and now lives a reclusive life at the snowy sleepaway camp where the movie was filmed, she is put on a course where Billy literally teaches her how to feel by experiencing Little Death for herself.

For those somehow unaware, “Little Death” is the translation of what the French call an orgasm, “la petite mort.” So the feeling that Billy helps Kris achieve is exactly that. Sex and death, pleasure and pain, flesh and fluids — these juxtapositions are what make slasher movies tick. Recontextualizing ’80s horror as more subversive, progressive, and meaningful than those who created it likely ever intended is practically its own subgenre of film analysis by now (I co-wrote a book about “SLEEPAWAY CAMP” doing exactly that), and “Camp Miasma” can’t help but continually break through the layers of meta-commentary to remind the audience that it already knows it isn’t saying anything new or groundbreaking.

A throughline in Jane Schoenbrun’s filmography thus far is the conflation and integration of the self with the media an individual consumes to the point of it becoming an extension of their being. Considering the slasher film fundamentally does not work without that intrinsic empathy, “Camp Miasma” is plagued by its own self-referential obviousness.

Coincidentally, it’s also the film’s greatest strength. We’re living in an era where a person’s sense of humor, sense of self, and guiding philosophical principles treat self-awareness as substance. Just as “I Saw the TV Glow” should have been a jumping-off point for an internal investigation of why the film spoke to someone instead of allowing it to be a replacement for their voice, “Camp Miasma” should inspire those who watch it to interrogate why slasher films make them feel the way they do, and what it says about their own relationship with sex and death.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is now playing in theaters.