‘Queer’ Horror Film Can’t Escape Conservative Reality

The liberal media is in love with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The new horror movie, which is actually a commentary on horror as a genre, is getting rave reviews. Director Jane Schoenbrun is a transgender person, which is enough to win over The New York Times and Washington Post. NPR upped the ante and assembled seven critics to call Camp Miasma “a queer horror master class.” The film has a 96 percent positive rating on the film review site Rotten Tomatoes. Although it was introduced in a limited release, it is now successfully expanding to theaters across the country.

Considering all of this, it’s interesting is that Camp Miasma ends up (intentionally or not) reenforcing the rightness of the most primal sexual desires of normal heterosexual women while lampooning the woke and sexually heterodox attitudes of the left.

The protagonist of Camp Miasma is Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), a 29-year-old “polyamorous” director who wants to do a “queer” reboot of a series of 1980s slasher movies called Camp Miasma. She hopes to persuade Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, putting on a Southern accent and wearing a turban), who starred in the original movie, to reprise her role in the new one. Billy is an eccentric recluse living in the Pacific Northwest at a lakeside cabin where the first Camp Miasma was shot.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma starts off with a sharp and witty idea. Kris is a woke millennial, humorless and steeped in academic theory. Billy is Gen-X, sarcastic, blunt, and realistic. Kris says that she is “polyamorous” meaning that she has two lovers. Billy replies, “Oh, you mean cheating.” When they are watching a horror movie and Kris begins to give warnings about certain scenes being “transphobic,” Billy simply says, “Shut up.” To Billy, horror or “slasher” movies are about “flesh and fluid”—the fun associated with being scared while at the same time knowing all that blood is fake, and the production quality (in the case of ’80s films like Halloween, Friday the 13^th, and the fictional Camp Miasma) cheesy. After her first conversation with Billy, Kris texts her Hollywood agent: Billy “has a very strong Gen-X energy,” she writes. “I wasn’t ready for this vibe.”