Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
With that title and starring Gillian Anderson, this felt almost tailor made for me personally.
This film is made with so much love for the 80s slasher films like Halloween and especially Friday the 13th, but the good thing is that offers so much more than mere fanservice and references (though it has plenty of those too). You don’t get a slasher pastiche, but a wild satirical sexual awakening story wrapped in a double meta-narrative reaching directly to the viewers (or me at least) own relationship with these type of movies. Katie Welsh writes in a review:
… a sharp, playful, sexy and surprisingly warm Hollywood satire about repressed millennials who have outsourced their sexual desire to the movies. The film is a loving send-up of film nerds who’d rather intellectualize and compartmentalize than truly feel in any sort of sensual or embodied way.
…
The message here is to get out of our heads and into our bodies, and it’s OK if we need movies to do that.
(hangs my head in shame)
The film is screaming its metaphors from the rooftop. The killer in this fictional franchise is literally called Little Death, acknowledging the established interpretation of slasher films connection between death and sex, and the “le petite mort”-concept of orgasm being a little death. Part of the main idea in the film is the two female characters that can only find their own true sexual desire and get an orgasm through the killer, called Little Death, as they get stabbed to a bloody death by an enormous fishing spear.
There is enough self awareness in the film to make it genuinely ambiguous whether the over analyzing is really just an excuse to find an artistic reason to like seeing skampy clad teenagers screaming while they are “penetrated” by big sharp phallic objects. It really hits a personal nerve, as my wife is often looking at the tv and puzzled asking what the hell I am watching (I am not making it easy by being a fan of Italian giallo and Verhoeven), and there is undeniably elements of eroticism in these films. The screaming in terror and final breath as death occurs are eerily close to the sounds of pleasure, making these films sit in a conflicting place in your body when you watch them. What makes the film brilliant in my mind is that it refuses to give a definitive resolution to these of questions. There is a core message about going back to basics, “flesh and body fluids” and stop overthinking, but there is also enough self aware mocking satire of its own discourse, pulling the rug on the whole analysis, that fans or slashers are not given a completely free pass.
Rating: 5