For all the R-rated antics of the slasher films of the 1970s and ’80s, there was a certain puritanical impulse driving the slaughter of horny hetero teens and the survival of the more sexually-disciplined, even as queer and feminist viewers have embraced these films for their less obvious subvers ions and revelations, like the repressed homosexuality driving the bad dreams in Freddy’s Revenge, the second installment in A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, director of the first film, was not a fan of Jack Sholder’s more outré approach).  Rita Mae Brown, the feminist author of the 1973 lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle, even wrote the screenplay for one slasher: Amy Holden Jones’s 1982 Slumber Party Massacre, which plays more like an indictment of male privilege than misogynist fantasy, even as Jones follows the “flesh and fluids” template.   In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, their finest narrative to date, trans auteur Jane Schoenbrun, whose horror-adjacent films revolve around intense attachments between alienated youth and mediated fantasies, doesn’t simply recreate and explore the mythology behind fictional slasher Camp Miasma, they interrogate so-called elevated horror through stand-in Kris Williams (Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder, expanding on her Gen-Z creator persona), a filmmaker who has landed the job of her dreams: the chance to not only reboot the series, but to defuse the transphobia underpinning it, i.e. the killer, like the actor who plays them, is nonbinary. While Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, a key influence on Schoenbrun’s film, has the once-neglected, hockey-mask wearing killer Jason Voorhees, Camp Miasma has the once-bullied, ceiling vent-for-a-head Little Death (played by I Saw the TV Glow‘s Jack Haven). A play on the French term la petit mort, aka orgasm, Little Death takes revenge and/or gets off by spearing bullying camp counselors with a harpoon (Schoenbrun also references Hitchcock’s proto-slasher Psycho and Sleepaway Camp, the ultimate problematic fave).    Kris isn’t sure how she’ll shape this concept for a new era, but she’s convinced that Billy Presley (The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, with cascading Veronica Lake hair and Blanche Dubois accent), the reclusive star of the first film, will unlock the door, so she sets out to meet her in the dead of winter, which Schoenbrun creates with matte backdrops and glittery snow, adding to the hyperreal effect. Everything that transpires may or may not be real, starting with Billy’s home on the Camp Miasma set. If she found its making so traumatic that she retired afterward, she has embraced the trauma by living inside the film with her projector, props, and concession stand treats. The Camp Miasma series continued without her, so she missed out on the royalties, but she also missed out on the backlash, especially against the “killer trans trope” associated, most famously, with Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. Anderson played Miss Haversham in a 2011 BBC production of Great Expectations, and echoes of that infamous spinster abound here, except Billy isn’t an object of pity or revulsion. With Billy’s encouragement, Kris plunges  into the world of Camp Miasma, which is what she always wanted anyway, and not in spite of, but because of the visceral, sexually-exciting dangers.  Schoenbrun doesn’t stint on the braless boobs or geysers of blood, while taking to task Hollywood’s dependence on franchise filmmaking and their own academic tendencies. For all the heady and humorous elements at play—thanks to Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald and Mulholland Drive’s Patrick Fischler as film-within-a-film players—it’s also a swooning story of queer love with an ending that deliriously flips The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s iconic finale on its head as our blood-soaked final girls live to fuck and fight another day. See this at the SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thursday at 7:30 pm.  The post Review: A Killer Trans Film by Jane Schoenbrun appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less