Breaking Down the Euphoric Ending of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.The last thing Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) does before she dies is watch herself do it. She lies on a twin bed in Camp Tivoli’s Bunk 5, candles burning around her, rose petals scattered across the sheets, while Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) stretches out on top of her and coaches her toward the end. “You’re almost there now,” she says. “You’re almost dead.” Billy tells Kris to watch herself through the killer’s eyes, and the film obliges: The camera slips out of the cabin and into Little Death’s helmet as he climbs the steps, breath ragged, spear in hand.What follows is impalement and orgasm in the same instant—one spear through both women, blood passing from Billy’s mouth onto Kris’s upturned face—and when their breathing stops, the hole at the bottom of the lake pushes out a fresh videotape. That tape, and the women’s smiles in the film’s final moments, hold the keys to Jane Schoenbrun’s latest feature Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: a horror comedy, a love story, and the most sexually direct film of their career. It follows Kris, a young queer director hired to reboot the moldering Camp M...