Category: Horror

Released: 7th August
Seen: 26th October

The 80s slasher boom was an absolutely fascinating period of history when it comes to horror that can be looked at from so many angles. There’s the obvious business angle where films were effectively made by throwing darts at a calendar and making something around the date that it landed on, how many films essentially exist because the tax breaks in certain countries made them so cheap that it was almost like printing money or just how that era was a breeding ground for talent getting to break in with cheap films that could get high returns. Then there’s the actual stories of the films themselves, how the creation of the Final Girl inadvertently created a feminist icon, how these stories often revolved around sex and death being intertwined just as the AIDS crisis was ramping up or how they often took real-world fears and events and turned them up to an 11. For a genre filled with killer dolls, dream-based serial killers and a lot of summer camp hijinks, it is a surprisingly deep category of film that people have talked about a lot over the years since. Now it’s filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s turn to take us through their unique perspective of this period of cinema as a trans woman who clearly loved the genre of films that she’s pointing to with Teenage Sex & Death At Camp Miasma, even for all the parts of them that didn’t age well.