Getting out of my head with Camp Miasma

”What the heck are you watching?” is a phrase I occasionally hear from my wife when I am watching a movie and she glances at the screen. Sometimes it is ”Ugh, that is disgusting” or ”I see you are watching porn again”. Admittedly, I am not exactly making it easy for myself as I have a thing for sleazy erotic thrillers by Brian DePalma and Paul Verhoeven, Italian giallo films or American ‘80s slashers. These are whole genres of film whose defining feature is finding aesthetically great-looking ways to show beautiful (and scantily clad) young women being killed with sharp objects. I am not a fan of the term guilty pleasure, though in a slightly different meaning - it applies here. Enter Jane Schoenbrun’s latest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a movie that very directly, and loudly, asks the viewer to think about our own desires, our shame and to get out of our heads and into our bodies. Flesh and fluids. Note that this essay of sorts contains thematic spoilers for the…

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