If you are a horror hound and are unfamiliar with the name Jane Schoenbrun, you should seek to correct that as quickly as possible, because they are one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers working today. The writer-director got their start with shoestring budgets. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which mined webcam-based coverage and liminal horrors to remarkable effect. From there, they moved onto similarly heady horror material, just with a loftier budget and even greater ambitions, in the form of I Saw the TV Glow.
Now, after a few years away from the public eye, Schoenbrun is returning with their third feature film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The film is an even more overt delving into the horror genre than the filmmaker’s previous two works, dealing explicitly with the camp slasher subgenre, riffing on the Friday the 13th franchise in both substantial and aesthetic ways.
The marketing for the film has promised “a new kind of horror remake,” as the story of the film centers around a new filmmaker tackling an iconic horror franchise and collaborating with the actress who played the ‘final girl’ of the original installment. From the outset, this approach has sounded perfectly suited to Schoenbrun’s more meta and existential tendencies, and now, it sounds as if those initial thoughts are very much being confirmed, as the film has debuted to glowing reviews.
As of this writing, the film holds a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 88% on Metacritic. In both cases, this indicates near-universal praise for the film, with the overwhelming majority of those writing these reviews giving the film a positive write-up. What’s more impressive than those aggregated figures, though (which can certainly be a bit unreliable), is the sheer number of glowingly positive reviews the film has received from notable publications.
The way that a site like Rotten Tomatoes functions is that a review can only be one of two things: positive or negative. If a review is positive, then it is filed over into the positive section, regardless of how positive the review actually was. To this end, the infamous Tomatometer sees no discernible difference between a middling C-grade review and an A-grade review. This is how you wind up with inoffensive, widely palatable blockbusters earning incredibly high scores on the site, because any review that isn’t negative enough to be considered fully negative is counted positively toward the overall tally.
This can lead to a lot of confusion and muddying of the waters when it comes to discussions of a film’s critical reception, and it cuts both ways. Just as mediocre films can rack up high scores, the sheer abundance of such high scores can keep films like Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which has received a much larger amount of not just good but glowing reviews than many other films, from standing out as much as they should.
All of this to say, early word is that Schoenbrun has another barn-burning banger on their hands in the form of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The film releases in select cities this weekend before expanding to wider release later this month, and I personally cannot wait to see it for myself.
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