For Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow represents that \u201cegg crack\u201d<\/a> moment where trans people recognise their difference. The film\u2019s neon-infused, dreamlike quality reminds its characters that \u201cthere is still time\u201d for them to accept their authentic selves via graffiti scrawled throughout the world.<\/p>\n I Saw the TV Glow\u2019s deliberately downbeat ending is largely left aside for most of Teenage Sex and Death. But its introspective and heady yearning remains solidly in place. Here, Schoenbrun turns to the slasher genre as inspiration. The protagonist, young queer filmmaker Kris (Hacks\u2019 Hannah Einbinder), clearly represents Schoenbrun themself and their own experiences as an emerging trans filmmaker. <\/p>\n After Kris\u2019s first indie film, an overly intellectual slasher entitled Jouissance<\/a> (psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan\u2019s word for overwhelming ecstasy or transgressive pain or pleasure), she is hired to reboot the fictional 1980s slasher series Camp Miasma. Kris\u2019 tracks down the original film\u2019s star Billy Presley (Anderson) who, lives cloistered away Norma Desmond-style in isolation. She\u2019s living at Camp Tivoli in the Pacific Northwest, where the original Camp Miasma was shot.<\/p>\n Kris hopes to convince Billy to return (\u00e0 la Jamie Lee Curtis in 2018\u2019s Halloween<\/a>) to the franchise for her own queer-infused reboot. Yet her fascination with the original film and its star has a shattering impact on her work. She learns that Billy\u2019s experience on the film as a young ingenue led to her withdrawal from acting (and society) soon after its release. Evocative 1980s flashbacks reveal that Billy perhaps lost her virginity for real during a pivotal sex scene.<\/p>\n Billy and Kris explore their desire for each other and confront their past feelings of shame around sex. However, they are not alone at the abandoned set of Camp Miasma. The ghost of Little Death (Jack Haven) stalks them in their waking and sleeping hours. <\/p>\n Little Death is a spear-wielding supernatural terror in an HVAC suit. It wears a large square air vent as a head mask. Little Death is the horrific incarnation of trans-vengeance \u2013 a former trans camper bullied and drowned in the lake. Having lived concealed for years in a hole at the bottom of the frozen lake, Little Death emerges seasonally to murder oversexed teens.<\/p>\n The film is haunted by slasher history. Little Death amalgamates Angela (Felissa Rose), the trans-teen anti-hero of Sleepaway Camp<\/a> (1983), and Friday the 13th\u2019s Jason Vorhees (1980). <\/p>\n Jouissance is laughingly a \u201cretelling of Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain\u201d. But it\u2019s also haunted by the academic legacy of gender analysis from scholars like Carol J Clover<\/a> and Barbara Creed<\/a>. <\/p>\n Schoenbrun (via Kris) moves past the need to psychoanalyse horror film, shifting instead towards recent queer and trans scholarship \u2013 including my own<\/a> \u2013 that highlights the pleasures of spectatorship for LGBTQ+ audiences. <\/p>\n Trans culture itself is also haunted by a problematic past with camps. The real-life exclusion of trans women from the Michigan Womyn\u2019s Music Festival (1976-2015), led to the emergence of Camp Trans<\/a> as a counter-protest-festival, as writers like Susan Stryker and Michelle Tea<\/a> have documented.<\/p>\n In an interview<\/a> at Cannes this year, where the film won the Queer Palm, Schoenbrun stated that the film is \u201call about sex\u201d. The film and its central protagonists clearly become immersed in a psychosexual frenzy of self-discovery. <\/p>\n Just as the film endeavours to celebrate the pleasures of slasher film tropes unabashedly, Camp Miasma\/Tivoli provides a space for Kris to come to terms with her own aversion to sex. She declares at one point: \u201cI\u2019m bad at sex, I never have been able to lose myself.\u201d Billy retorts: \u201cthere is no bad at sex.\u201d<\/p>\n By experiencing Billy\u2019s prior trauma on film, Kris realises that the practice of switching point of view shots between killer and victim provides a cathartic way to disassociate from the suggested real-life sexual assault. Billy states she went \u201cfar away\u201d in her head to the point where she begins to \u201creceive a signal\u201d \u2013 a way of viewing the experience from the \u201ckiller eye\u201d POV of Little Death, allowing for a reconfiguration of the trauma itself. <\/p>\n With its melding of stylised painted sets and a blurring of fake and real set locations, Schoenbrun\u2019s fondness for nostalgic hyper-reality is finely honed here. <\/p>\n Sonically, the film\u2019s wistful soundtrack and its visual immersion into 90s pop consumerist tropes is reminiscent of both Cronenberg\u2019s body horrors<\/a> and Araki\u2019s work from New Queer Cinema<\/a>). <\/p>\n As with I Saw the TV Glow, the film\u2019s conclusion shifts into the symbolic and adopts a tone of estrangement, perhaps revealing that, despite its affiliation with the genre, Teenage Sex and Death is not a slasher film per se. Rather, this is that \u201csomething else\u201d that I<\/a> and other<\/a> researchers believe has come to define queer horror, as it continues to emerge as a powerful force for speaking about the horrors and pleasures of difference.<\/p>\n Darren Elliott-Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Gillian Anderson plays Billy, a reclusive actress famous for playing a classic \u201cfinal girl\u201d. That\u2019s the last woman left alive to confront the killer in a slasher movie. \u201cIt\u2019s all about flesh \u2026 and fluids,\u201d she explains when discussing the appeal of the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The haunting of the slasher<\/h2>\n
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