Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups: 'Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,' Dolly Parton, More

What I've Been Into...

"Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." People can fall in love with the wrong people. They also can fall in love with the wrong art. Even though it's trash and they know better, they can't help themselves. There's something about it: The attraction is there.

This odd, funny, utterly unique film seems to explore this phenomenon. Nobody should like slasher films, which tease us with predictable, needlessly graphic violence all wrapped up illicit sex: Teen-age girls at camp, scantily clad, being chased through the woods with a knife or worse. How could anyone enjoy, let alone traffic in, such an indefensible genre.

That's the question before us and Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), a up-and-coming filmmaker who's been charged with creating an update of a long-running, stagnant horror franchise. If she takes an ironic stance, applies some gender commentary and updates the whole works for a Gen Z audience, maybe she can create something that's smart, sharp and artful, Kris figures. She seeks out the star of the original entry series, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), hoping to cast her in the reboot.

Billy, it turns out, actually lives in an abandoned summer camp like the one featured in the movies. Billy's been so trapped by her role that she can't escape it, and she's come to know and embrace its dark appeal. And Kris realizes she's being seduced by it, too.

How can she rehabilitate something irredeemable? How can she undermine the thing she inexplicably loves? She fantasizes about being a "final girl," terrorized and exploited, even as she sees through the cheap manipulation of such sexist tropes. But she likes it, no matter how messed up and twisted it might be.

Director Jane Schoenbrun places us in the same predicament. Why do we watch such stuff? What is it about us that actually likes it?

And, all the while, the film makes us laugh: At it, and at ourselves.

Einbinder ("Hacks") makes us see ourselves see Kris: Thinking we're above it all, but falling prey to it nevertheless. Anderson also is excellent, giving Billy eccentric, mysterious appeal.

The look of film, as in Schoenbrun's equally excellent "I Saw the TV Glow" from 2024, is fascinating and otherworldly, luring us into a dark, twisted, yet strangely appealing world that's all its own.

As a horror film, "Camp Miasma" doesn't terrorize us with short-lived jump scares, but, instead, leaves us feeling quietly haunted, long after the credits roll.