Whereas I Saw The TV Glow channeled trans dysphoria through the language of 90s pop culture, Jane Schoenbrun’s third film reaches back to the 80s to capture something like an incipient trans euphoria. The narrative revolves around Kris, a young queer filmmaker played by Hannah Einbinder, who has been tasked with reviving Camp Miasma, an 80s horror franchise based in equal parts on Friday the 13^th and Sleepaway Camp that spilled out into an endless string of sequels, spin-offs, board games, video games and other merchandise well into the new millennium. Kris is in a difficult position, wanting to testify to the transphobic legacy of Camp Miasma (it’s here that we see the overlap with Sleepaway Camp in particular) but also resistant of the sanitised corporate wokeness that the studio execs seem to expect by selecting her as an openly queer director to revivify their IP. Searching for the heart of the franchise, and the heart of her own ambivalent attachment to it, Kris tracks down Billy, the final girl of the original, played by Gillian Anderson, who lives at the long-abandoned summer camp in the Pacific Northwest where the series was shot.

Right from the moment that Kris arrives at the camp, and discovers a home theatre playing a scene from Camp Miasma, film and reality start to converge – and in some sense, the film never leaves this space, or the increasing proximity and intermingling of Kris and Billy. There are other characters in Schoenbrun’s film, but they only exist within the world of the original Camp Miasma, or through the occasional Zoom calls that Kris take to communicate with the outside world. As the opening references to Sunset Boulevard indicate, this is a chamber drama, in which two people mediate their relation to each other through the fantasmatic nature of film, the dreamlife of images, and it is in this connection that Schoenbrun starts to glimpse a blueprint for trans euphoria. For while Kris is never explicitly identified as trans, apart from a passing early reference to using she/they pronouns, she exhibits the same disjunction with her body that trans people might be imagined to experience in the midst of transition. Kris inhabits a legibly and unambiguously female body but she has never fully acclimatised herself to its sexual possibilities or proclivities, confessing to Billy, as their relationship grows more intimate, that she has never really “got” sex and that she has never (it is implied) truly experienced orgasm, or deep bodily pleasure.

It is here that the film’s beautifully complex perspective on the great slasher cycles comes to the fore. On the one hand, there is no doubt that Sleepaway Camp, and others of its ilk, were transphobic before we even had the language to describe transphobia – they are, in some sense, the reason why we didn’t possess that language at the time. Yet Camp Miasma is not content to simply settle for this academic detachment, and indeed when Kris interrupts a highly suspenseful section of the film (in Billy’s home theatre) to point out that “this next part is transphobic,” it’s partly played for laughs, in an affectionate parody of the contemporary fan who feels compelled to anachronistically point out everything problematic about an earlier generation of genre cinema – genre cinema whose whole point was precisely to be problematic and provocative. By contrast, Kris finds a way to articulate her deeper and more residual attachment to the slasher genre when Billy confesses that she, too, had issues with sexual pleasure, issues that were undoubtedly intensified by the world of Camp Miasma, but that she only resolved, in a diegetic collapse, in the film’s pivotal scene, where she is almost killed by the slasher, appropriately named Little Death, as her character loses her virginity to her boyfriend. As the final girl, we can only assume she wasn’t killed, but as Billy tells it, not only her character but she herself was murdered, impaled by Little Death’s spear, as she experienced her first and strongest ever orgasm.  

The reason that Billy tells Kris this anecdote stems from Kris own’ confession that she could only ever have sex by imagining herself far away from the person she was with, and far away from her own body – by imagining herself in Camp Miasma. Time after time, Kris recalls, she would imagine herself to be one character or another in the franchise, but Billy teaches her that this was simply a primitive version of the lesson she learned: that the key to achieving pleasure was to not only place herself in the perspective of the other, in the form of the young man to whom she was losing her virginity, but to place herself in the perspective of the Big Other, and inhabit the gaze of Little Death, who was watching the whole thing and preparing to penetrate both Billy and her boyfriend on the same phallic spear: “I was viewing myself from outside myself, like I had acquired a new set of eyes – his. I was Little Death…I was the watcher and the one being watched.” In response to Billy’s anecdote, Kris realises that her fantasies of Camp Miasma were an inchoate version of what she really wanted: to be both the subject and object of the killer’s rage in the short period between when he first spies his victim and when he stabs his victim. In that juncture between gaze and penetration lies an unequivocal and insatiable desire that, for Kris, turns out to be the key to unlocking her own sexual self, as she finally achieves orgasm while sleeping with Billy as a scale model of Little Death looks down at her from the landing.

Camp Miasma thus speaks to a longing at the heart of trans femininity that is as complex as it is basic: to be ratified by the male gaze in the same way as any cis woman. For Kris, Camp Miasma may have shaped her transness through its ignorant fearmongering, but it equally shaped her femininity through its conception of the Big Other, and it is between those two poles that Schoenbrun’s film unfolds, in the same way that its subliminal blending of cinema and “real life” gradually constellates around Kris coming to occupy two gazes at once: that of her own trans body and that of the serial killer, the Little Death, whose desire is so blinding and immediate that it makes no distinction between a trans body and a cis body. After all, this is the paradox of Sleepaway Camp too – that the killer, despite inhabiting a trans, intersex or otherwise indeterminate body, still ends up promulgating an utterly gender-normative view of the world in terms of victim selection. At the heart of the film, then, is the euphoria of inhabiting a trans body that can be mistaken for cis, or that is unremarkable as cis, and these two experences, along with Kris’ dual gazes, converge around the shot in the original Camp Miasma film in which Little Death’s face is reflected in the curvature of Anderson’s orgasmic eye, a close-up so extreme that it fuses Billy and Little Death, and implodes the diegetic boundaries of the film into Schoenbrun’s phantasmagoria.

As with I Saw The TV Glow, then, Schoenbrun is not exactly making horror so much as a trans magical realism that revels in junk culture as a shimmering threshold between the here-and-now and the what-might-be. Nowhere is that clearer than in one of the film’s most striking signatures: the fetishistic aura that surrounds junk food. When Kris arrives at Billy’s house, she’s greeted with KFC fried chicken and fries served on lavish plates and tureens, which Schoenbrun accompanies with a slomo, vaseline-tinted paean to the pleasure of dipping sauce. Billy’s expensive pieces of furniture turn out to be curated repositories for the snack bars and candy items that once populated video store checkout points, sites where the trash culture of the eyes and the trash culture of the body intermingled. And this delight in both the disposability and durability of junk food segues beautifully into the film’s paean to physical media, both in the opening montage sequence, which depicts the multifarious material afterlives of the Camp Miasma franchise and archive, but also in Kris’ first visit to the local supermarket, where she stocks up on candy and buys a copy of Camp Miasma 6 off a discount rack at the point of sale. To live in a trans body, Schoenbrun seems to suggest, is to be hyper-attuned to both the disposability and the durability of the material world, and it is between those two poles, using the language of serial horror, that her film finds its beautiful, funny and mercurial vision of trans euphoria.