> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://malloryelliott.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What If the Real Miasma Was the Movies We Watched Along the Way? - URL: https://malloryelliott.ghost.io/what-if-the-real-miasma-was-the-movies-we-watched-along-the-way/ - Published: 2026-09-17T14:23:57.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-17T14:42:26.000Z - Description: Jane Schoenbrun's third feature, "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma," is an charmingly bonkers self-parody of horror geekdom, but it doesn't have the heart to go in for the kill. - Author: Mallory Elliott *SPOILERS FOLLOW\~\~\~!* For some people, 2024 was *Brat* Summer, and I guess they had a better summer than me, because for me it was *I Saw the TV Glow* Summer. I [had my problems](https://malloryelliott.ghost.io/i-saw-the-tv-glow-and-all-i-got-were/) with the movie, but it still had a profound effect on me and a lot of other trans people, and despite the fact that it was a loud and obvious allegory for being a closeted trans person, cis people got down with it too, finding equally valid meaning in its exploration of toxic media nostalgia and suburban repression. While it wasn't exactly a blockbuster, its cultural impact was unusually large and broad for the product of a transfeminine filmmaker dealing nigh-directly with trans experience. I wouldn't die on this hill, but I'll argue that it's the most important transfeminine film of the ["tipping point"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender%5Ftipping%5Fpoint?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) era (roughly 2014-2024). I might go even further and say that, arriving a few months before the accelerated persecutions of the second Trump era, *TV Glow*'s bitter pessimism toward cis society and almost fanatical urgency around transition was one of the clearest artistic declarations of that era's end—but I'm not here to talk about that—not today, anyway. We are, at any rate, in another era, and for their follow-up, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has not just made another *TV Glow*. On the surface, at least, *Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma* is [something completely different](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hYZaqYCZyQ&ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io). Rather than an icy, alienated tragedy, we have a mirthful, gleefully tasteless, maniacally self-referential comedy about sexuality and horror fandom—something fun and funny, but still too tense to convincingly enjoy itself. This is perhaps simply a reflection of Schoenbrun's protagonist: a repressed leftoid lesbian film director named Kris (Hannah Einbinder), who's capable of teasing herself, but hopelessly addicted to taking herself seriously. Kris has travelled to the borderlands of the Pacific Northwest to find Billy (a based and delightful Gillian Anderson), the original star of an 80s/90s summer camp slasher franchise called *Camp Miasma*, modeled after *Sleepaway Camp* and *Friday the 13th.* Billy is a reclusive weirdo who lives on the set of the original film, and Kris, an up-and-comer tasked by Hollywood production hacks with reviving the utterly dead franchise for the woke fandom crowd, is determined to involve her. What unfolds is basically a yuri plot—a wise and sexually comfortable (yet conveniently available) older woman thaws out the frigidity of an uptight younger woman—but all of it happens alongside a discourse about the nature of the slasher genre: its grotesque, reactionary sexual politics, its wanton sexism, and its undeniable pulpy allure. Eventually we learn that Kris' frigidity is due to her shame around her kink: she's turned on by the scenario of being a dirty slut who gets the slasher's knife mid-coitus, a fantasy she developed through watching slasher movies at too young of an age. This kink is inherently cinematic, involving a ping-ponging of perspectives between that of the dirty slut and that of the slasher, so that Kris identifies both as the penetrated and penetrator, woman and—well, this part is complicated, but for convenience let's just say man. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/Sleepaway-Camp-web.jpg) Don't get too rough with her, boys—a still from 1983's **Sleepaway Camp*. It's complicated because the acknowledged elephant in the room here is *Sleepaway Camp*, a slasher series whose villain, Angela, was assigned male at birth but raised as a girl by her mad aunt (her dad is also gay, it turns out, but I'm not getting into that). As adolescence begins stirring inside her, she finds herself unable to contain the torrent of confusion and rage she's felt her whole life, leading her to take gruesome revenge on everyone who bullies her at summer camp. In the first film's notorious ending, she reveals her true form—i.e. her penis—to the surviving inhabitants of the camp, howling a distinctively male howl. You might expect that such a character would go on to live as a man, finally, but in the sequels (created, to be fair, by totally different people) Angela actually embraces the femininity imposed on her, going on, in subsequent films, to officially transition and continue her moralistic murder spree. Angela would not be the first or the last trans or trans-adjacent slasher villain in the history of the genre, which began in 1960 with *Psycho*'s Norman Bates, a young man whose fragile ego is overwhelmed by the superegoic persona of his fearsome mother. Although he wears a dress and wig to commit his murders, Norman, based on [misunderstandings of the case of Ed Gein](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxiQ-ATkvLs&ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io), is never identified as a transsexual, but Bobbi, the villain of Brian de Palma's *Psycho-*influenced *Dressed to Kill* (1980), is quite explicitly a frustrated transsexual woman—even if transness is badly misunderstood in the film as a sort of split personality. Bobbi's female side loathes the male side, driven to kill anyone she/he's attracted to (queue the sound of crickets). *Sleepaway Camp*'s Angela, arriving three years later, might be seen then as a fusion of the Norman-esque Jason Voorhees of the *Friday the 13th* films (also tormented by an insane female parental figure) with DePalma's Bobbi. The most notorious trans-adjacent serial killer, Buffalo Bill from *The Silence of the Lambs*, was introduced in Thomas Harris' 1988 novel. Bill's story is even stranger—he is, as the mad psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter explains, not actually a transsexual, but a sociopath who believes himself to be a transsexual. Through this brilliantly idiotic stroke of character invention, the cis audience is permitted to gawk at the monstrous specter of transness while absolving themselves of the guilt of transphobia. But what really separates Bill, an empty-souled man grasping at the straws of transness to feel coherent, and Bobbi, an actual trans woman driven to murder by the agony of her condition? Whatever we might answer, it's clear that the desire of male-assigned people to be women, or their identification as women, whether chosen or imposed or both, became indelibly associated in 20th century cinema with severe mental illness and serial murder, despite the fact that there is no correlation, much less causation, between sociopathy/psychopathy and transsexuality, and, while there have been a couple of confirmed serial killers who transitioned, their extreme rarity among the serial killer population (just a couple out of [about 3600 documented cases](https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/qmss/2023/03/04/serial-killer-statistics/?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) in American history) hardly justifies such a stereotype. The concern here is not merely academic: a couple of of the real-life legacies of this sensationalist pop cultural trope are the notion that only "neurotypical" people with sterling mental health should be allowed to transition, especially if they are minors, and the anxiety many cis women feel that trans woman have violent intentions in entering female spaces. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/images.jpeg) Jesus fucking christ dude —**The Silence of the Lambs* (1991) Schoenbrun, however, despite their making the *Camp Miasma* slasher villain, Little Death (Jack Haven), a male-assigned bigender kid, is less interested in deeply picking apart the slasher genre's transphobic legacy than playing it up for laughs—specifically in the way Kris, a cis woman, virtue signals about her distaste for this aspect of the plot—and using the bigendered nature of Little Death to connect them to her psychodynamically. That may sound disapproving, but none of this bothers me very much in itself—nor does the fact that there aren't any transfeminine actors or characters, apart from Little Death, in the film (unless you count a very minor cameo from Louise Weard). I think it's actually a great act of feminism to project trans lesbian sexual psychology onto a pair of cis lesbians, because it shows how little psychological difference there actually is between cis and trans lesbians. I also don't need Schoenbrun to really tackle the trans slasher because, let's face it, the trans slasher is never going to be retired. It's just too fun. The same goes for all this toxic crap, transphobic or not. Sex, both in the sense of sexual difference and in the sense of the act of intercourse, is far too allied to death in the human psyche. Teen horror is the place—one of them, anyway—where we confront that truth as scary but also absurd, and learn to look beyond it. If the specific messaging around this has been reactionary historically, it's only in keeping with the rest of American culture. Only the sweet summer children of the woke Internet would ever have expected the genre to have a nuanced, intersectionally-informed take on the notion of sluttiness. Kris' intentions, and those of the Hollywood money that allows her to visit Billy, are their own kind of absurd, and the movie knows it. Billy's role in the film is to let Kris down from her politically lofty goals and find a way to get her to accept the fact that *the human heart is not woke*—it's not fascist, either, it's just a hot mess, and it must be cared for as such, and not expected to be anything else. --- I, on the other hand, *would* like to go deep on the trans slasher for a second. I'm[ hardly the first](https://www.dreadcentral.com/editorials/295274/going-back-to-sleepaway-camp-revisiting-the-problematic-classic/?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) to argue something along these lines, but I think a lot of "girls like us" can actually relate to characters like Angela. On the surface, the mad aunt is a post-*Psycho* cliche, but it can also be read as a nasty cipher, a garish representation of the mysterious, multifacted processes by which some male-assigned children learn—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—to understand themselves as girls. Transness is not some random idea that emerges from us unbidden—no idea does. [To wit](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUQlRTKCIBO/?hl=en&ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io), the Lacanian Marxist transphobe Slavoj Zizek: > The problem is: How do we know what we desire? There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural, about human desires. Our desires are artificial. We have to be taught to desire. I hold that sex and gender are to a large extent socially constructed, which means everyone's gender identity is a collective project integrating ideas about the self from a subject's surroundings with the subject's own disposition, which then influences those external ideas in an endless feedback loop. Crazy as it may sound, especially to cis readers, womanhood is something trans girls, just like cis girls, are *taught* to desire. You're Angela, buddy. Be careful with that axe. Unlike in *Sleepaway Camp*, however, this process is not based on some deranged whim. We *do* have, in [the case of David Reimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%5FReimer?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io), a horrifying example of an attempt at gender indoctrination on a deranged whim, performed in the 60s by the actual mad scientist John Money. Something in Reimer, apparently deeper than anything social construction can touch, seemed resistant Money's program of female socialization, but trans girls are the opposite: the adults and other kids in our life can sense that something is different about us, and so can we, but it's quite possible that nobody has the words to articulate it, and even if they might want to, we're all ashamed and confused about what it could mean. Our femininity is then cultivated wordlessly, by implication, but it is nonetheless cultivated, even if this cultivation is disavowed by everyone involved. It also tends to have a negative cast. Transfeminine kids are often more passive, socially dependent, and sweet-tempered than their cis male peers, and are accordingly taken advantage of in myriad ways, the worst of them being childhood sexual abuse, which is reported by a disturbingly disproportionate number of us. Many of us prefer the company of cis girls over cis boys, but the taboos around cross-gender friendships between children can challenge these connections, and even if we can maintain them. We grow up tormented by cognitive dissonance re: gender and sex, treated like girls and drawn to feminine things, and maybe permitted to do so here and there, but forced in the end, often painfully, to account for ourselves as boys. It makes some of us numb, some of us sentimental and melancholy, some of us pathetically eager to please, some of us pretty mean, and a few of us a little crazy. The dialectic of the trans slasher is that they are, as a cis creation, at once a sensationalist, rubbernecking freakshow figure *and* a woefully misguided attempt to empathize with this sort of cognitive dissonance and the madness it generates. *Psycho,* odd as it may be to say today, was a progressive film in its perspective on crime: Hitchcock makes it clear that Norman is himself a victim, worthy, to an extent, of sympathy—he's just a victim with his own victims, so he's got to be locked up. Anthony Perkins, informed by his own frustrated homosexual desires, picked up on this and amplified it through his incredible performance, elevating the film from artful schlock to something of a different order altogether, and establishing the trans slasher as a tragic monster—a crude, uncomprehending cis registration of the fact that transfeminine people suffer immensely inside, and their suffering, like anyone else's, isn't always innocent. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/09/image-1-1.png) Typical trans woman's revisionist history. I submit that the wholesale rejection of this figure, onerous as he is, often comes with a lamentable disavowal of the intense negative emotions that emerge from closeted experience. This is understandable. Like most women, we're uncomfortable with our aggression, preferring to take it out almost every time on ourselves; cis people, meanwhile, are entirely too preoccupied with it. It's easier to look at characters like Norman, Bobbi, Angela, and Bill and say "those aren't trans women." But everyone knows *that's what they're supposed to be*. They can't simply be ignored: they must be overcome. God help me, I'm about to quote Zizek again, but there's a passage in [an essay of his](https://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) that I think about all the time, in which he addresses: > a certain kind of feminist critique which persistently denounces every description of femininity as male cliché, as something violently imposed onto women. The question that instantly pops up is: what is, then, the feminine "in itself", \[not\] obfuscated by male clichés? The problem is that all answers (from the traditional eternally feminine, to Kristeva and Irigaray) can again be discredited as male clichés. Carol Gilligan, for example, opposes to the male values of autonomy, competitiveness, etc., the feminine values of intimacy, attachment, interdependence, care and concern, responsibility and self-sacrifice, etc. Are these authentic feminine features or male clichés about women, features imposed on women in the patriarchal society? The matter is undecidable, so that the only possible answer is, both at the same time. The issue thus has to be reformulated in purely topological terms: with regard to the positive content, the male representation of woman is the same as woman in herself; the difference concerns only the place, the purely formal modality of the comprehension of the same content (in the first case this content is conceived as it is 'for the other', in the second case, as it is "in itself"). This purely formal shift in modality, however, is crucial. In other words, the fact that every positive determination of what woman is "in herself" brings us back to what she is "for the other" (for man), in no way compels us to the male-chauvinist conclusion that woman is what she is only for the other, for man: what remains is the topological cut, the purely formal difference between the "for the other" and "for herself". That's admittedly a bit heady, but the point is that in figuring out what it means to be trans women, much of what we have to work with are clichés of transfemininity from media and popular culture. Many of these are highly pornographic, always imagining us "chicks with dicks"; many others, attributing to us a garish, exaggerated feminine performance, result from our conflation with drag queens. The creepy sociopath with the fucked-up mother isn't the only thing we are to cis people: we're also alluring sexual deceivers, tragic dreamers who defy nature, psychological/medical curiosities, and cock-gobbling fantasy lays—sometimes all all in the same production. We've had no choice but to build our self-images, and our own culture, out of these clichés, while finding a way to make them express things they omit or erase. Whether we appropriate or resist them, these beliefs and archetypes become our own through this process—"for ourselves," in Zizek's language—and they take on a different meaning simply because we are working with them. The question of whether or not to claim Angela has split trans women for many years, but I'm with *Nevada* author Imogen Binnie, who, in her [podcast discussion](https://imogenwatchesclassicfilms.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/sleepaway-camp-1983/?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) of *Sleepaway Camp*, pithily summarizes the film as as "A movie about this heroic trans girl who basically murders everyone who fucks with her, which is why it became such a classic film." --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/09/image-2.png) If it gets too real, you can always turn it off —Norman Bates in **Psycho* (1960) Little Death is also sort of a hero, a figure who, in a metafictional manner, takes humanity's intolerable lust for violent satisfaction upon themselves, emerging from their Lynchian underground lair to kill again and again, psychically feeding on our own eroticized terror like a perverse Christ—for us it is toxic, but it nourishes them–and thus is another film birthed from the vagina of the VCR. *Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma* is about Kris' coming to terms with her intolerable lust for violent satisfaction and finding a way to enjoy it (based, love it), but only in the high security environment of bounded sexual play, with Billy functioning as a servile facilitator of a closed, autoerotic loop—basically the operator of a carnival ride (or perhaps a cinema projectionist) rather than an active sexual partner. Billy's mantra: "If it gets too real, you can always turn if off." This is a pretty dim view of sex, in my opinion—a view based in *control* rather than *trust*. Of course one's partner should always stop immediately when asked or otherwise signaled to, but how can there be any *real* excitement if you've always got your finger on the eject button? I think *gr*eat sex, the kind of sex that can change you, is precisely about things becoming too real, and that's never something that can be plotted out entirely beforehand. There's got to be some spontaneity coming from your partner, some unpredictability, and that can only come with trust that your investment in *them* will take you somewhere, blindfolded, that you didn't even know you wanted to go. The real fantasy here, I suspect,is actually *turning it off*—an anxious, guilt-drenched plea to not have to have a sexuality at all, to return to some childhood space where *it's all just a movie*. I don't want to call this simple cowardice—people get like this for a reason, and it should be respected—but it is a very confined way to live. Don't get me wrong, this movie is cute and sweet in a crazy, morbid way, which I love. It's visually *bonkers—*it looks like nothing else you will see this year. There's a lot of fun stuff in it. The opening sequence, showing an assortment of imagined *Camp Miasma* ephemera, is lovingly done. There's a crazy, way-beyond-Tarantino murder spree sequence set to "A Long December" by Counting Crows, and it has a beauty to it that's hard to explain. I was grinning. Schoenbrun's withering characterizations of various Hollywood ghouls are little smug, but very satisfying. Einbinder and Anderson are wonderful. But I left the theater a little frustrated. I tweeted out to Bluesky that I'd just seen the trans lesbian version of Emerald Fennell's *Wuthering Heights*, and I regret that, because it's not nearly as funny as *Wuthering Heights* (no well-made film could be)*,* but I perceive in both the same aversion to living, interpersonal, red-blooded sexuality. I know, I know, I should let people enjoy things. This movie is gonna be really good for a lot of people. Coming to terms with your autoerotic fantasy is very often a prerequisite to learning how to engage in an alloerotic way, or to merge the two modes—if you can't admit what you want, you probably don't want to face what the other wants either. *Words Plus Time* is not a kink-shaming publication, dear reader: as long as there's consent all around, I wish all of you little sluts the freakiest evening you desire. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/09/image-6.png) But there is another part of me—a less generous part—that still wants to say all of *this*, in this movie, is so excruciatingly *tame.* The trans slasher isn't secretly our *servant*! She's a heroic trans girl who basically murders everyone who fucks with her, which is why it became such a classic film! As with *TV Glow*, Schoenbrun ultimately forces the world to accommodate fantasies, rather than fantasies to accommodate the world. These slasher flicks can't actually bear the weight of our investments—if you remain there, you become that most accursed of creatures, the *fandom goblin.* Of course these movies have cultural resonance, but they aren't, in themselves, some big, fraught thing—they're just a jack-in-the-box popping up and you scream and then you laugh. That's how the medicine goes down. To become *so* preoccupied, even in such a clever, self-aware, postmodern way, is to refuse to take it, to still demand substance from cheap practical effects and a badly written script. Schoenbrun knows this, but on some level they don't seem to want to, because they stubbornly remain, as a creator, in that moment of knowing and not yet acting on the knowledge. --- I'm so sick of this culture, man, it's absolute ass and it has been for a really long time. We consume trash and become trash, and then we try to make meaning, and all we have is trash. It's barely possible to really think or feel under these conditions, and few of us really can. Americans are wildly superficial and glib, and standards are getting lower all the time. I'm no exception. A few years ago, out in the desert, I took some acid and mushrooms, and for a few minutes at the beginning of the experience I was so overwhelmed I had to lay down and close my eyes. The outside world became irrelevant as I tunneled deep inside my mind, seeing all kinds of garish, frightening images—but then I realized that all of these images were monsters inspired by the 80s and 90s horror visuals I'd seen on the VHS boxes at the video store as a kid. I'd plumbed my psyche, and all I found there was intellectual property. There was nothing in here that could scare me, much less spell my doom—it was just my dumb, limited mind. Not long after, I got up and started enjoying the rest of the trip. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/09/image-5-1.png) You and me and everyone we know. Kris, on the other hand, is deeply embarrassed that there's nothing in her but intellectual property. She needs it to mean something, to have it redeemed. She can't be empty, but emptiness is form, dear reader. Stuff something in that hole, some object, some scenario, and keep stuffing it, and maybe you'll get off, and hooray for you. But to face the emptiness, to see yourself in the other, and the other in you, and everything in both of you—to immediately *know*, for an eternal instant, the mutual dependence of being and non-being—that requires bolder intentions, not for redemption or affirmation, but for undoing and remaking. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/09/image-3.png) I love this, but how did we get here? Game Shark code? God help me, I'm quoting Torrey Peters again, but I'm reminded here of *Detransition, Baby*, the scene in which worldly, experienced trans woman Reese is trying to figure out how to sexually reach her partner, the newly transitioning, nervous Amy: > The more sex became like cybersex or camming, only in person, the more comfortable Amy seemed. Reese surmised that the majority of sexual situations in which Amy had genuinely felt at ease had occurred within easy reach of an Off switch. *Camp Miasma* presents the off switch as a liberating element, but Reese sees it for the obstacle it really is: Amy is trapped inside her poor little head. The simplest solution happens by accident, when Amy takes poppers, but, crucially, with someone she *trusts*, and not merely in a situation that feels safe: > The problem with the poppers was that they made Amy too dumb to keep all that cognitive machinery going. It all ground to a halt, and \[...\] she fell into direct contact with a raw fact: She was a girl in love with a girl. It was overwhelming. It was all she had ever hoped for. Kris, meanwhile, is glowing after her big orgasm and totally ga-ga for Billy, the two of them kissing, covered in blood in a convenience store—it's wonderful imagery, but these scenes don't feel totally earned. Compared to the messy, fallible Reese, who draws Amy out of herself by the strength of her own personality (and to Amy's detriment, ultimately!) Billy is only the magical Final Girl, a fairy godmother for jerking off. Is that really what we just saw, a girl in love with a girl? The movie wants us to think so, clearly, but all we really saw was a girl in love with a movie, cognitive machinery on overdrive—and if these two are happy, I guess I'm happy, but I think we can do better than that.