Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review – Gillian Anderson superb in queer slasher spectacular

Young indie film-maker Kris tracks down Anderson’s Final Girl for a remake of a beloved horror, to find fantasy and reality collapsed Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink. As before with Schoenbrun’s films, I found myself thinking of Gore Vidal’s (unfashionable) novels Myra Breckinridge and Myron. This is a film that somehow persuades you that the 80s slasher genre is an exalting and liberatingly progressive experience. As before, in their We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Schoenbrun pulls off the trick of inventing an imaginary media phenomenon and treating it with complete fan-seriousness – an online horror game and cult scary TV show in the first two films and now a slasher movie franchise called Camp Miasma about a teen transgender killer called Little Death wearing a ceiling vent as a mask (why is never explained) who periodically emerges from a lake in a sleepaway camp where scantily clad young people will be brutally speared. The opening credits wittily walk us through the fran