Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes pains to deliver a slasher fan’s dream - Ars Technica

Overview

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes pains to deliver a slasher fan’s dream

Matte paintings—not CGI—warp a world designed to hit a nerve for slasher fans.

Details

Here’s one for all the kids who were exposed to lurid slasher movies when they were way too young and it kinda messed them up… but they’re finally ready to laugh about it.

Jane Schoenbrun’s latest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is shocking, emotional, provocative, numbing, warm, witty, and surreal. It’s a slasher nerd’s dream, with a David Fincher-esque attention to detail in the opening sequence, which was designed using insights gathered from horror convention-goers. Written to indulge superfans, the movie also makes sure to not lose the general audience. Just as the geeky navel-gazing threatens to become tedious, a joke or a wink keeps the audience laughing and focused on the fantastical story Schoenbrun actually wants to tell—which isn’t a genuine slasher at all.

The movie follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer film director tasked with creating a “woke” reboot of a politically incorrect sleepaway camp franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th. On her way to meet the reclusive final girl from the original Camp Miasma film—Billy Preston, portrayed deliciously by a junk food-obsessed Gillian Anderson—Kris fails to nail her pitch and instead gets yanked into a fantasy buried deep in her psyche while at the abandoned set where Billy now lives.

The movie is very personal for Schoenbrun, who told NPR that they grew up watching films like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare On Elm Street, and feel like they know slasher movies “so, so deeply.” Just as they did with their prior film, I Saw the TV Glow, their goal with creating the Camp Miasma franchise within the film was to tap into the intense emotions of being a kid developing an obsession with an entertainment property that’s not intended for their eyes. In Kris’ case, that obsession was with Camp Miasma, its tortured villain Little Death, and the oversexualized victims who ended up on the other end of Little Death’s spear, terrible sequel after terrible sequel.

The film’s production designers, Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland, explained in recent interviews that Schoenbrun wanted the movie’s visuals to be as emotionally charged as the subject matter. From the outset, Schoenbrun asked the designers to look to old moviemaking tricks for inspiration to make the landscapes at the Camp Miasma set as dreamy and immersive as the director envisioned. To achieve this, the designers decided to revive an old pre-CGI technique called matte painting. The only problem, they said, was that no one alive knew exactly how the filmmakers of the ’60s got the technique to work.

So the designers essentially winged it, scouring old film books and blogs for any kind of direction. To create the otherworldly shots, they painted ethereal backdrops on glass, leaving some parts of the canvas blank so the actors could be positioned to appear as if they were walking through them.

The process was anxiety-inducing, the designers said, since they wouldn’t know whether it would work until the director lined up the glass with the camera lens and the actors moved through the empty spaces. But the attention to detail paid off, allowing the designers to be much more playful with the scene art. For moviegoers, it’s a reason to lean in close to the screen rather than duck for cover from the next jump scare.

Used to memorable effect in classic films like Metropolis or Hitchcock’s The Birds, matte paintings require everything to go right to get the shot. For Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, five matte paintings were created by a fine art painter, scenic artist Joel Rodriguez. Schoenbrun was so delighted by the result that they reportedly added more footage with the glass shots than initially planned, using them to warp Billy’s world to convey the increasingly wild emotions Kris is feeling.

Some painted scenes played with cool and warm contrasts, showing purple mountains on cantaloupe-colored skies. One especially colorful backdrop punctuates a climactic scene in which Einbinder and Anderson walk hand-in-hand, covered in blood. But the most striking painting might be the flesh-padded backdrop in a scene with one of Anderson’s most memorable lines. Trying to help Kris recognize that she’s thinking about slashers too intellectually, Billy reminds her that the genre isn’t about gender or identity politics but “about two very simple things—flesh and fluids.”

There’s much more for fans of special effects to discover, from the practical snow used whenever feasible to the geysers of fake blood used to comedic effect. But the film’s complexity comes from the dynamic between Kris and Billy. Kris gradually realizes that she doesn’t want to simply recreate the look she saw on Billy’s face in the first movie. She wants to experience what it feels like to wear that expression herself and to see herself as vulnerable through Little Death’s eyes. Instead of a window into the franchise, Billy serves as a patient sex guru/slasher spirit guide, encouraging Kris to release her shame and fully realize her most twisted fantasy.

While inspired by psychosexual slashers, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is ultimately about exploring every angle of humanity’s irresistible urge to spook and be spooked—anyone who’s ever shouted “Boo!” in a giggling baby’s face can understand. And that’s clear from the moment Kris gets to Billy’s home in the abandoned camp set.

Near the beginning of the movie, Kris lets herself into Billy’s private cinema, which, of course, looms forebodingly before a dazzling matte-painted mountainscape. Anderson’s character makes her entrance by suddenly popping out from the shadows, startling Kris.

“I’m sorry,” Billy tells Kris. “I saw you, and I wanted to scare you.”

Slasher fans may be disappointed to learn that Schoenbrun has no interest in developing any more Camp Miasma movies. But the director would be interested in rebooting Nightmare on Elm Street, they told NPR. Paramount is currently seeking the right director for it, and no story details have been released.

“That one is enticing,” Schoenbrun told NPR of the potential project, which would be their first real stab at a traditional slasher. But Schoenbrun would only sign on if they could have maximum creative control rather than serving as a “middle manager” overseeing a boring retread of Wes Craven’s classic.

“I want to really care emotionally and deeply about the thing I’m working on,” Schoenbrun said.

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Key Takeaways

• Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes pains to deliver a slasher fan’s dream

• Matte paintings—not CGI—warp a world designed to hit a nerve for slasher fans

• Here’s one for all the kids who were exposed to lurid slasher movies when they were way too young and it kinda messed them up… but they’re finally ready to laugh about it

• Jane Schoenbrun’s latest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is shocking, emotional, provocative, numbing, warm, witty, and surreal

• The movie follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer film director tasked with creating a “woke” reboot of a politically incorrect sleepaway camp franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th