Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has its streaming home. The slasher starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson premieres exclusively on MUBI on Friday, October 2, which puts it on the service right at the start of Halloween month.
It will not arrive only as a stream. MUBI has also had the film transferred to a true pan-and-scan VHS tape, which is headed to the MUBI Shop and is already touring. A run of VHS screenings starts the same night the film hits streaming, at Beyond Fest at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles, and continues through October 20 at video stores and microcinemas in Brooklyn, Portland, Madison, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Austin and Seattle. Every ticket comes with a limited-edition Camp Miasma VHS pin, and most dates are already sold out.
A Slasher Sequel About Making a Slasher Sequel
Einbinder plays Kris, a young filmmaker hired to revive the waning Camp Miasma slasher franchise. Her plan hinges on Billy, the reclusive actress who starred in the original, played by Anderson. Their meeting, in the words of the official synopsis, “sends the two women into a strange, blood-soaked world of desire, fear and delirium.” Jack Haven, who co-starred in Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, plays the franchise’s ghostly killer, Little Death. Haven told us about building that villain in our interview this summer.
The bench behind them is deep and a little absurd in the best way: Amanda Fix, Arthur Conti, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Kevin McDonald, Quintessa Swindell and Trick ‘r Treat‘s own Dylan Baker. In a film about the long afterlife of a horror franchise, finding Principal Wilkins in the credits is a nice touch.
From Cannes to the Video Store
The film opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May, then went to theaters through MUBI on August 7 in New York and Los Angeles before expanding over the following two weeks. It is also already available to buy digitally, so the October 2 date is for subscribers who waited.
The VHS release is the more interesting move. Schoenbrun’s films have always been about what happens to people who grew up inside their media, from the online horror challenge of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair to the half-remembered TV show in I Saw the TV Glow. Camp Miasma is about a slasher series that meant too much to the people who watched it, and the natural habitat of that kind of movie was a clamshell case on a rental shelf. Shipping it on tape is the film’s thesis in physical form.
If you missed it in theaters, October 2 is the date to circle. If you want the version with tracking lines, the tour dates and ticket links are on MUBI’s Camp Miasma page, and the rest of the month’s releases are on our upcoming horror movies calendar.
