It’s hard to know where to start with this one.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma oozes nostalgia, sexual awkwardness, satire, classical movie references and an awesome playlist. It’s strange, ridiculous and completely aware of it.
Gillian Anderson is everything in this. Such grace and poise while being so ridiculously hilarious at the same time. There’s a clear Norma Desmond energy to her character, something the film itself calls out, and the Sunset Boulevard influence fits perfectly with a movie so obsessed with movies, performance and its own mythology.
The Friday the 13th reference is impossible to miss and maybe that’s the one thing that made me think twice about the film’s originality. But then again, the originality isn’t necessarily in the reference itself, it’s in what the film does with it. It takes something that’s now 46 years old and twists it into something stranger, more sexual and more self-aware. I do wonder how much of that reference even registers with a Gen Z audience who may have never seen Friday the 13th in the first place.
And somehow, through all that nostalgia, this film presented a new perspective that I’m quite pleased about. Something I’ve never really thought of before: the sexual undertones in ’80s slasher movies and the strange relationship between sex, death and liberation. Here, death and gore can somehow become the liberation of a character rather than simply its end.
It feels obvious now. Something quite simple that I’ve just never paid attention to before.
Even the killer’s name, Little Death, plays into it.
Death doesn’t necessarily mean death here. And that’s where the loose ends come in. Things don’t really make sense when you stop and think about them—but I’m not sure they’re supposed to either.
Little Death is making the movie, but the movie is about Little Death. They exist because of the movie, yet somehow the movie exists because of them.
So what came first?
The chicken or the egg?
The videotape or the boy?
It’s an absolute great watch, especially if you’re interested in being entertained by something slightly outside the box. Breaking narratives, fucking with reality and leaving you trying to work out what exactly you just witnessed.
What the hell did I just watch?
Whatever it was, it was fucking good.
And I want to believe.
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