Is Camp Miasma a Dream?: All the Clues That Nothing Is Real - and Why That Matters
Jane Schoenbrun’s queer, meta slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is finally on UK cinema screens – but can we trust anything in the film actually happens?
Camp Miasma stars Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder as up-and-coming indie director Kris, tasked by a major Hollywood studio with rebooting an ageing horror franchise (also called ‘Camp Miasma’). To do so, she tries to convince the series’ original Final Girl, Billy Presley, played by the iconic Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, Sex Education), to reprise her role. What follows from there is a dreamy psycho-sexual relationship between the pair, in which they dig into their respective formative traumas around intimacy together. This all takes place on the campsite where the Miasma films were shot, and appears to be haunted by the franchise’s killer, Little Death, who may or may not be real.
From that summary, I’m sure you can get the gist of how layered Camp Miasma is. In fact, and this is a significant spoiler, the explanation the film provides is that Little Death, who lives in a sort of pocket dimension under the camp’s lake, is the only real thing that exists in this world, with each Miasma movie, including the one we’re watching, being a figment of their imagination.
However, looking at other clues in the film, another more subtextual explanation is possible: Camp Miasma doesn’t take place in Little Death’s mind, but Kris’. This theory is not only easier to get your head around, but also strengthens the film’s themes for greater coherency.
When Does Reality End and the Dream Begin in Camp Miasma?
We can divide Camp Miasma between reality and fantasy at a very obvious place. Everything that happens up until Kris falls asleep in the motel can be interpreted as real – her getting the job to reboot the slasher franchise, talking on the phone to her partner (played by Scream alum Jasmine Savoy Brown), checking in to the motel en route to Billy’s home, and putting on Camp Miasma: Part VI surrounded by enough snacks to feed a family of four.
The point at which we leave this reality and enter a dream world is when Kris falls asleep on the motel bed. The scenery outside her window deliberately looks like a painted set – a background detail present throughout the film. You could chalk this up to an aesthetic choice from Schoenbrun, whose previous works similarly blur the line between fantasy and reality; however, given how heavily metatextual Camp Miasma is, coupled with its own suggestion that we’re watching a story of Little Death’s twisted creation, it’s very plausible that we’re supposed to take these visual cues as more literal than artistic.
All of the Other Clues That We’re In Kris’ Sexual Fantasy
Kris and Billy’s entire relationship plays out like self-insert fan fiction: Kris gets to go, alone, to meet an actress she’s been obsessed with since childhood, and finds that said actress is living on the set of her favourite film franchise. And, oh, it’s so snowy outside, and getting late – why not stay the night? Maybe two nights? And, wow, the elusive, experienced older woman not only agrees to be in her film, but is also actually romantically interested in her, patient, and willing to sexually heal her. Sure, it could be a bored fascination or a real connection, but it all feels very convenient.
Things ramp up during Camp Miasma’s finale, in which all of the side characters who’ve been thorns in Kris’ side – her polyamorous partner, their partner, Kris’ distracted agent, and the shallow Hollywood execs looking to cash-grab from a more queer-friendly, cinema-going generation by dusting off a problematic, zombie IP – pop-up out of nowhere in the woods to become Little Death’s victims while Kris, as vocalised earlier in the film, does the scantily-clad scream queen run from the killer that she always wanted to do.
When Kris and Billy are finally killed – skewered mid-climax in an almost painfully obvious Freudian moment – the couple wake up the next morning, seemingly unharmed but drenched in blood, and head to the nearest convenience store where no one bats an eyelid at their appearance.
Perhaps the biggest and most consistent indication that we’re in Kris’ head, however, is the use of sweets as part of Billy’s home decor: they form a nest around the couple during their first sex scene on the cabin floor, and you can even see lampshades made out of wrappers later on. Considering Kris fell asleep in the motel surrounded by confectionery, it’s not a stretch to think that her sugar-addled brain is inserting one of the last things she remembers before falling asleep into her dream.
Why the Dream Explanation Works, and the Little Death One Doesn’t
The ‘it was all a dream’ framing is very old and very cliché by now. It can also be a frustrating way to wrap up a story as it can make the audience feel like their time has been wasted on a cop-out. However, for Camp Miasma, it not only feels entirely plausible, but entirely appropriate for the film’s core theme of reckoning with sexual trauma to celebrate and act upon one’s innermost sexual desires in a safe space, no matter how taboo.
Through her confessions to Billy and flashbacks to her watching the first Miasma film as a young girl, we know that Camp Miasma, and specifically, Billy’s character’s sex scene in it, became Kris’ sexual awakening. However, in her adult life, she’s had difficulty receiving and finding pleasure from sex. When the older woman first initiates an intimate physical connection, Kris recoils apologetically; it’s clearly a source of shame and inadequacy for her.
The reveal that the film is fictionalised from Little Death’s perspective is a strange one given that we spend much of Camp Miasma understanding and sympathising with Kris rather than the killer. While Little Death’s backstory – a gender-fluid, bullied camper in the vein of Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13th and Angela in Sleepaway Camp – is also a sympathetic one, and likely one that Schoenbrun personally identifies with, the explanation that Little Death is the only thing that’s real and only they have authorial control feels underbaked and muddles the film’s coherency. It also robs Kris – and Billy – of any agency, which is at odds with Camp Miasma’s most emotionally resonant moments of reclaiming a beloved but often misogynistic genre from an historically exploitative gaze.
It’s certainly a powerful and interesting idea to make the slasher perpetrator, who was wronged in life and vengeful in (un)death, the all-seeing architect instead of the unhinged, brainless monster society must overcome in every new story. However, the argument that most of it takes place in Kris’ subconscious grounds the highly surreal film in more fully developed emotional realism, allowing the audience to more effectively connect with it.
