You can’t make a proper slasher anymore. The genre has been skewered and parodied so comprehensively that even the new Halloween movies – which I thought were generally pretty good, particularly the second one – sometimes felt like po-faced Scary Movie riffs on the franchise. Let alone the Scream films; they’ve become a bottomless spiral of ironic nods at an originating movie which was itself an ironic nod at its predecessors. You would never even think that there was a real genre there to begin with.

The two best slasher movies I can think of are also among the earliest – Black Christmas from 1972, and John Carpenter’s Halloween from 1978. What’s interesting about these films is, despite the fact that they essentially launched the genre, they actually don’t have much in common with the movies that followed them, apart from the fact that they all centre on a madman with a knife chopping up young people. The big difference is that neither Black Christmas nor Halloween could be called “fun” movies. The violence is genuinely nihilistic and frightening. There’s no erotic charge to be had. But the slasher movies of the 80s and onwards were really defined by the endlessly parodied scene of a nubile teenage couple making out, getting hot and heavy, before they’re both murdered in a bloody shared climax.

Slashers are problematic – unbelievably so. They have a perverse fixation on teenage sexuality, they eroticise violence against women, they treat any kind of deviation from the norm as a dangerous abnormality. But they’ve never quite lost their appeal as a cultural artefact. The weird thing about slashers is that, despite being utterly reactionary in their worldview, they can sometimes feel oddly transgressive as well; probably because they’re not that far removed from pornography in terms of the gratification they seek to give their viewers. Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is basically an extended response to this question: can we enjoy these films, or nah?

Schoenbrun’s last two movies, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, were fundamentally about loneliness. They centred on protagonists who were basically incapable of aping the spurious social forms that pass for community in the modern age. What they have instead is fandom – fandom of horror and television shows. But fundamentally, it’s not enough; in fact, these virtual communities only make loneliness worse by appearing to offer an escape from it. They’re both deeply depressing movies. I loved We’re All Going to the World’s Fair; there’s a degree of sadness and honesty to it which is really unique. I liked I Saw the TV Glow a lot, but it played out across a much bigger canvas than World’s Fair, and the ending felt a bit unfocused.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has a very different tone. The protagonist, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the defunct Camp Miasma slasher franchise (as her agent, played by Sarah Sherman, says, make it “woke”). The Camp Miasma films are about an immortal genderqueer killer, Little Death, who periodically emerges like Jason Voorhees from the bottom of a lake to annihilate the jocks and cheerleaders who persecuted them in life. Kris travels to meet with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who played the final girl in the first Camp Miasma movie, in hopes of recruiting her to take part in the remake – but also because a scene of Billy’s character having an orgasm while watching Little Death murder her lover was Kris’ queer awakening.

When she meets Billy, she expects an eccentric recluse – particularly when she discovers that Billy is living in the original location where Camp Miasma was filmed. But Billy turns out to be an extraordinarily charming woman, who has gone into obscurity not from fear or personal dysfunction, but rather from being healthily satisfied in herself – in contrast to Kris, who embodies the millennial anxiety of not just embarrassment, but of coming across as a bad person. At one point, Kris expresses the fear that her fixation on Billy might be problematic, or “me-tooey.” Billy replies that she auditioned for 1981’s The Burning – “Do you know who made that? You don’t scare me.” (It was Harvey Weinstein.)

Teenage Sex and Death is not a horror movie, let alone a slasher; it’s a comedy that becomes a love story. A lot of the humour, particularly at the start, comes from Kris’ obtuse relationship with the slasher films she adores: at one point, while watching a scene of Little Death murdering a pair of horny teenagers, she writes “DESIRE” on her notepad and nods knowingly. It’s a funny gesture at the fact that the relationship between sex and death in slasher movies has always been completely obvious; it’s hardly a “subtext.” Her thesis was on “intersections of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity” – the big film in this regard being 1983’s Sleepaway Camp, which is genuinely deranged (and scary). Billy tells her, however, that slasher films have only ever been about two things, “flesh and fluids”; they’re made to excite, and if you take a critical lens to them, you’ll miss the whole point of the exercise.

Large parts of the film are taken up by footage from Camp Miasma itself, giving an opportunity for Schoenbrun to show their real skill at creating homages that are believable at first glance whilst being totally uncanny. The soundtrack by indie musician Alex G, who scored World’s Fair, makes some of these sequences feel quite poignant. And really, the film is about the genuine possibility of human connection, which makes it tonally very different to Schoenbrun’s last two movies. The romance that gradually develops between Kris and Billy is that of an older woman guiding a younger woman to discover her sexuality. This is like a modern viewer learning to enjoy slasher movies on their own terms, rather than over-analysing them; one needs to surrender to their basic stupidity and enjoy the ride, just as with the “little death” of an orgasm.

My issue with Teenage Sex and Death was that the love story that develops does not quite sit comfortably with the film’s arch tone. The film is on one level about how over-reflection, irony, can stop a person from enjoying not only sex, but other pursuits; but the film itself creates an ironic bubble that it doesn’t escape, so that it’s hard to engage emotionally in the relationship between Kris and Billy. Both Anderson and Einbinder are so likeable and charismatic in their roles that they almost overcome this – but not quite. It sometimes feels like the script was the end product of a lot of rewriting as Schoenbrun figured out what direction they wanted to take. There are some horror elements in the film which individually are great, but don’t really sit well with the rest of it. Schoenbrun has a real talent for special effects, and an amazing visual imagination; but in Teenage Sex and Death those scenes almost feel like teasers for a different movie.

When I left Teenage Sex and Death, I felt like the film was in some way less than the sum of its parts. The performances are fantastic; the soundtrack is lovely; the scenes that are aiming to be funny are genuinely funny, and in other parts it’s quite beautiful; and when it tries to be unsettling, it succeeds, albeit in a tantalising way, without following through. I might be unfairly placing the film in relation to Schoenbrun’s other works, but its optimism doesn’t feel earned. Despite the unreality of the story, it does not feel as if Schoenbrun wants us to regard the whole thing as a total fantasy. But I wasn’t quite sure how else to regard it.

I don’t want to sound too negative; Schoenbrun is an incredible director, a genuinely original talent, and it feels like a privilege that we have more films to expect from them. Teenage Sex and Death didn’t quite do it for me, but I was also conscious that it might mean more to people with different life experiences. It’s certainly not formulaic.

 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens on Thursday in Australian cinemas.