Written and Directed by Jane Schoenbrun | 112 min | ▲▲▲▲1/2 

My only slight reservation about Jane Shoenbrun’s terrific follow-up to I Saw The TV Glow is its title: The sex and death explored in this film feels entirely adult.

This is a hugely impressive picture that once again pays homage to trashy genre and media from a meditative, compassionate place, like their last did, while also being a delightful step forward into something new. The picture turns out to be a 21st Century horror dipping the deep fried slasher genre in the sweet bbq of Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Kubrick’s The Shining.

A couple of things I should admit right away: I didn’t watch Hacks, so while I recognize Hannah Einbinder has become something of a queer icon recently, I don’t know her work at all. More importantly, I’m definitely not a fan of ’80s slasher pictures — I appreciate a lot of other movies from that era, but I’ve got no special love for the 13th Fridays or the Elm Street Nightmares. And yet, despite not being in either of these fanbases I can report Camp Miasma  is a total joy. I can now easily admit to being a fan of Jane Shoenbrun.

I feel like the filmmaker is channelling what those movies made them feel when they watched them rather than being slavish to the plot or specific details — one of the ways this film oddly parallels Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” along with both films including scenes of fleshy walls.

I am also very much in the pocket to enjoy Gillian Anderson’s elevation as a Gen-X erotic goddess, between her work on the series Sex Education and her books Want and More.

Here she’s Billy Presley. She was the Final Girl in the original Camp Miasma movie who refused to keep making them when the inevitable, substandard sequels were churned out through the 1980s and 1990s. These days she’s a bit of a recluse, having purchased the actual camp where the movie was shot and living there alone. That’s where Kris Williams (Einbinder) finds her — Kris is a queer filmmaker from the city who’s had some initial success and may be given the keys to this moribund franchise, to reboot it for a new audience.

Kris has no illusions about how Hollywood regurgitates these problematic stories, or her role in the machine, but she feels like if she can get Billy to sign on she can do something that feels authentic and true to the original, which Kris watched (and adored) at too young an age. It’s Sleepaway Camp clone with the murderer a trans kid who was bullied to death, drowned at the camp’s lake, who comes back for his revenge as Little Death, wearing a ceiling vent on his head — a fantastic and unexplained visual icon. With an enormous, phallic spear, he skewers the campers.

Something in that film served as a queer sexual awakening for Kris, though in her grown-up life sex has been a little disappointing. Cue the journey she takes into Billy’s world and the world of the film as reality bleeds into fantasy and wish-fulfillment through a rich vein of nostalgia and a deep understanding of media.

Like I Saw The TV Glow, the film is operating on multiple levels. Kris is certainly a stand-in for Shoenbrun and their growing Hollywood success. What Shoenbrun does so deftly is find a way to celebrate past trash while also acknowledging how problematic they were as seen from more than 40 years later — that’s a magic trick never done so elegantly. Where this film especially diverges from TV Glow is in how playful it is — it acknowledges the sexism and male gaze of those slashers, while also acknowledging and expressing the excitement of watching beautiful people in the nude, having sex, and maybe getting drenched in fake blood. Dipping, indeed.

Shoenbrun is also indulging in their own act of cinematic revenge, one expects, rooted in Little Death’s origin as a trans person. He gets to murder all the miserable heteronormies who bullied him.

If the film was all this, a comedic, psychedelic horror and media examination, it would be plenty worth watching, but it goes a lot deeper than that. It’s also a love story between Kris and Billy, with the elder woman helping show the younger how to locate her ecstatic release. Yes, Camp Miasma is also about the importance of the orgasm, without being titillating or trashy. In this deeply prudish moment we’re living in, that’s some kind of triumph.

One last note: Keep your eyes open for a few deliciously cast supporting roles, like Kids In The Hall‘s Kevin McCarthy, SNL veteran Sarah Sherman, and Eva Victor wearing a righteous mohawk.