TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
Starring Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson
Released 21 August
8/10

Our appetite for horror seems insatiable. Even as cinemas close and the industry teeters towards collapse, the success this year of Obsession and Backrooms suggests that you can still count on kids to go into the dark to be scared out of their wits. What's it all about? In director Jane Schoenbrun's latest ravishing phantasmagoria, Gillian Anderson seductively suggests it's our simple ancient hunger for "flesh and fluids".

Kris (Hannah Einbinder from Hacks, having a ball) is an up-and-coming director, hot off the back of a Sundance hit and tasked with reviving the "zombie IP" ("it's not literally a zombie movie," she insists) of Camp Miasma, an exhausted Friday 13th-style 1980s slasher franchise. "They want it elevated - AKA woke," advises her agent (SNL's Sarah Sherman in a devilish cameo). But for Kris this is a surprisingly personal passion project. Watching the first movie as a precocious eight-year-old, catching sight of something strange in the final girl's eyes, turned out to be a profoundly formative experience.

Still pursuing that uncanny gaze, Kris heads to the Pacific Northwest to meet Billy Presley, the girl from the first movie, now grown into Gillian Anderson: a Norma Desmond-style recluse with an accent marinated in the same Dixie dipping sauce as Benoit Blanc's. Billy refused all the Miasma sequels, but moved to the abandoned summer camp where it was filmed, to live alone as a pale phantom of the franchise. In her fairytale snowglobe cottage, Kris falls under Billy's spell and realises she needs to reconceive everything, not just her plans for the film but her whole identity.

Schoenbrun grew up writing Buffy fanfic in the first generation of online fandom, something apparent in the lovingly created lore and bobbleheads of the extended Miasmaverse. As with Joss Whedon (and his protege Drew Goddard, see The Cabin in the Woods, 2011, in particular), the winky, tropey references are fun but can prove exhausting.

Schoenbrun is smart enough to know this: a key scene has the pair watching an original print of the first Miasma film in the summer camp cinema, with Billy having to hush Kris's relentless commentary. It turns out that the director's journey is about learning to make the kind of films you can surrender to, rather than wreathe in academic discourse.

On these terms Teenage Sex... doesn't entirely succeed. Though it's always sensational to look at, there's a Lynchian loveliness to the red fountains gushing into the snowy night, it ultimately veers away from the miasma (the horror is played for laughs) towards the camp (in the Sontag sense) and a conclusion that is pure romantic comedy, albeit with showers of blood rather than confetti. But it proves Schoenbrun to be a director of rare vision, on a mission to understand how screens have formed and deformed us.