Opening the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma marks Jane Schoenbrun’s return to the terrain: adolescence as horror mythology, movies as emotional habitat where there are endless fried chicken and candy. The film observes how identity is something performed through cultural debris rather than discovered naturally – the question of whether that has always been like that remains open. The film follows Kris, played by Hannah Einbinder, a filmmaker attempting to resurrect the long-abandoned Camp Miasma slasher franchise, where Little Dead butchers teenagers in the woods. Kris is eager to find Billy Presley, the Camp Miasma series’ original “final girl,” portrayed by Gillian Anderson. Billy is an eerie combination of sexiness, detachment and exhaustion.

Anderson is wonderfully in her element, eccentric, impeccably stylish, and sharp with a mischievous smile. Billy lives at Camp Miasma, where the final movie was shot. She moves through the film like the opposite (or alter ego) of Kris, whispering to her to stop intellectualizing herself into paralysis. Camp Miasma is simple, she says, it’s all about “flesh and fluid”.

It turns out Schoenbrun/Kris is not interested in reviving slasher iconography nostalgically. The genre becomes a framework through which to explore queer longing, aging, bodily alienation, and the strange violence of acute self-awareness. The film with its modernized trash aesthetics is on point. Fluorescent junk food, VHS textures, candy wrappers, processed colors: companions to teenage desires and fantasies.

Schoenbrun joyfully pushes the boundaries into the kitsch and grindhouse aesthetics making their second Cannes appearance very enjoyable and worth watching.
Oh and, that Arthur Conti: why is he so good at playing those mysterious freaks?

The film will be released theatrically in Germany in August.