The Friday Night Horror Movie: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)MV5BOTRl MWM2Zm Qt NTlj ZC00MTg0LTlh Nz Qt ZDg2N2Fi Mm U1

This has been a long week. Friday was a long, exhausting day. By the end of it, I had no energy and no brain power for much of anything. I sat down last night and watched Mad Love, a 1935 film starring Peter Lorre as a mad doctor who operates on a famous pianist’s hands and replaces them with the hands of a knife-throwing killer. It’s a good movie, and Lorre is wonderful in it.

I had intended to make that my Friday Night Horror movie. It was a pretty straightforward film, and I figured it would be easy to write about. Then I watched Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. That is not a straightforward movie, and it will be difficult to write about. But I really wanted to write about it. I found it to be a fascinating watch.

I could have still made Mad Love my Friday Night Horror film and then written about this one later on. But I’ve gotten very lax about writing about movies on this site, and I was afraid that if I put it off, I’d never get around to it. But the way my brain works is that I feel this real need to write my Friday Night Horror articles every single week. If I don’t, I feel actual guilt.

But I was way too exhausted to put anything together about this movie last night. So, I could have written about Mad Love, but that would have completed the Friday Night Horror task, and I would have never gotten around to writing about Camp Miasma. Instead, I didn’t write anything last night, and now I still feel obligated to write a Friday Night Horror movie. So here we are, Saturday afternoon, completing the article.

Truth be told, I still don’t think I’ll be able to write all that I want to about this film, but I’ll try.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is this wonderful homage to 1980s slasher films viewed through the lens of pop culture-obsessed, weirdly repressed Millennial eyes.

Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is a young, intellectual, somewhat pretentious filmmaker who is in the process of rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. This is a Friday the 13th-esque slasher series that started in the 1980s and spawned numerous sequels before finally rendering itself irrelevant.

She is someone who says things like, “My work explores the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” and whose earlier film basically remade Psycho but from the point of view of the shower curtain. She’s also someone who, while watching the original Camp Miasma, sees a shot using a split diopter and joyfully says out loud, “split diopter.”

Which is to say, this is a film about and made for film nerds. People who grew up watching slasher flicks, put their Letterboxd details in their social media profiles, and run blogs dedicated to obscure films. Which is to say, this is a movie made for me.

For inspiration, Kris reaches out to Billy Pressley (Gillian Anderson), the final girl of the first Camp Misma film, who became something of a recluse after that film became a success and who now lives in the abandoned summer camp that the original film was shot in.

Anderson and Einbinder are incredible in this movie. Anderson turns Billy into this sweet, weird stoner who sounds like a horny Dolly Parton. Einbinder makes Kris into a nerdy bundle of nerves who has substituted cinema for real life.

All of their scenes together, I just loved. I didn’t so much love scenes in which she’s video chatting with her girlfriend or her agent or the movie studio people. There is some funny, satirical stuff in those scenes, but through it all, I just wanted to get back to the central relationship between Billy and Kris.

There are a ton of references to old slasher films throughout this, and even direct references to Sunset Boulevard, and probably a thousand things I missed. The opening credit sequence shows us paraphernalia from all the Camp Miasma films, which make great references to the Friday the 13th films and Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and so much more. I loved that stuff.

There are loads of flashbacks to the original Camp Miasma movie and even long sequences where Billy and Kris watch it together. Again, many of those scenes are throwbacks to real movies from the 1980s. There is one long shot, set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” that follows Camp Miasma’s killer – called Little Death, who wears a box mask that looks like a ceiling vent – as he kills half a dozen teens with a spear. The scene looks nothing like anything ever seen in an ’80s slasher; the kills spill CGI blood like a geyser, and “A Long December” came out in 1996.

All of those things were definite choices by director Jane Schoenbrun. I don’t see them as mistakes or some kind of budgetary decision. I think they meant it to come out the way it appears on the screen. Reading other reviews, a lot of folks seem to love that scene. It really took me out of the film. So much of the other scenes we see from the Camp Miasma films look and feel like a real 1980s slasher, so I was really thrown by the intentional decision to make that scene so not like the others.

In a similar way, Schoenbrum gives a very artificial feel to the sets. Many of the outdoor scenes have these glossy, classic movie-looking backdrops. It is a very intentional look and decision by Schoenbrum. This time I wasn’t thrown off and rather loved it, but I still am not smart enough to understand exactly what he was trying to say with them.

It has a lot to say about living inside your own head. Kris talks to Billy about how she has difficulty enjoying sex because she can’t allow herself to just live in that moment. To have an orgasm, she has to leave her own body somehow. The film plays with these ideas in some really fascinating ways. Again, I’m not smart enough to understand all of it. But I will say the villain’s name – little death (or le petite mort in French) is slang for orgasm in France.

It isn’t a perfect film. I’m perhaps a little too old to understand some of what the film is doing. And I grew up in spaces that were very far removed from the queer experience, something this film is very much delving into. But it is a very good film. One I like more the more I think about it. I’m very much looking forward to watching it again. I will very soon be watching Schoenbrun’s other films.

I Love Boosters is the Pick of the Week

I Love Boosters

My site isn’t very big. I do a lot of my movie writing for Cinema Sentries, which isn’t exactly a big site either. I do it for fun (and the occasional free Blu-ray). I’m not particularly well known in film critic circles. That’s ok. But every once in a while something kind of cool happens.

This week, Boots Riley, the writer/director of this week’s pick, retweeted Cinema Sentries tweet about my article. I didn’t actually write that much about the movie, and he may not even have read that. He’s probably in promo mode for the Blu-ray release, but its still kind of cool.

You can read the full article with that move and more here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ghostwatch (1992)

Ghostwatch

On Halloween night 1992, the BBC aired Ghostwatch, a scripted television movie that had been shot a few months earlier. It purported to be a live event – an investigation into a paranormal occurrence at a house in London. They did an amazing job at it.

They hired Michael Parkinson, a real-life TV presenter and journalist, to host the show. He sits in the studio with Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), who is a true believer in the paranormal. Also in the studio is a phone bank where they take phone calls from folk who have also experienced strange activity in their lives. This is something real news programs did at the time on the BBC. They say the real phone number was inundated with calls from actual viewers. You might call this the English version of the War of the Worlds radio program Orson Welles did many years prior.

On location is Sarah Greene, also a real television presenter at the time. Her crew is portrayed by real BBC crew members. The house is owned by Pamela Early (Brid Brennan), who lives there with her two daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim (Cherise Wesson).

They get all the details right. I remember watching similar shows when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s. There were lots of pseudo-documentaries on during the Satanic Panic, and folks like Geraldo Rivera were always doing paranormal specials. It feels very real.

Parkinson is perfect for this type of thing. He sits and talks to Dr. Pascoe for a bit, then he’ll throw it to the phone or the location shoot. It all feels like a live shoot, as if he’s working off the cuff just a bit. Sarah gives her part a nervous energy, like someone who doesn’t really believe this stuff, but is still just a little bit scared at first.

The film starts off a bit slow. There is no indication that any of it should be taken seriously (the ghost stuff, I mean; the movie is deeply serious in its setup). But then weird things start to happen, but slowly. Some viewers call in saying they saw a shadowy figure in the girl’s bedroom. In the studio, they play the clip again. Something is visible for just a second. It looks like a man standing by a curtain. But the hosts say they see nothing. They look at it again, and the figure we saw is gone.

There are several moments in the house where we see flashes of something or someone. Stranger things happen. Loud noises occur. Tensions build. And build some more. I know this thing is fake, but it still got me. It took me a little while to get into its groove. Because they got the production values so perfect for an early 1990s TV show, I was taken back to my youth. This is exactly the sort of thing I would have watched as a teenager, for real. But it’s now the sort of thing I’d scoff at. But once it got going and I fell into its lure, I absolutely loved it.

What a unique, incredible little film.

Five Cool Things and Godzilla Minus Zero

cc Point Blank

Hello friends, it is time for another Five Cool Things. This week I’m talking about The White Lioness (which I already reviewed for this site), Once a Thief (a groovy thriller where Alain Delon speaks English), The Outside Man (where Roy Scheider plays a hitman), One Cut of the Dead (which I already reviewed for this site), Point Blank (where Lee Marvin plays – what else? – a cool badass), and the new Godzilla movie. You can read all about it at Cinema Sentries.

The Inugami Family (1976)

The Inugami Family Blu

I often requests movies that I’ve never heard of before to review. I usually do look around at Letterbox reviews before I make a request just to get a general idea of whether or not folks whose opinion I appreciate enjoyed it or not. But it is always taking a plunge. I love it when the movie turns out to be better than expected.

The Inugami Family is terrific. It is very much like a Japanese take on an Agatha Christie story and almost certainly influenced Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series.

It is a murder mystery set in a grand old house filled with quirky family members and a disheveled detective trying to solve it all. I loved it. You can read my full review here.

Show Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Inglewood, CA (10/23/78)

Originally posted on my Substack where you can find images, videos and more goodies.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse
The Forum
Inglewood, CA
1978-10-23

Sugar Mountain
I Am A Child
Comes A Time
Already One
After The Gold Rush
My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)
When You Dance I Can Really Love
The Loner
Welfare Mothers
Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown?
The Needle And The Damage Done
Lotta Love
Sedan Delivery
Powderfinger
Cortez The Killer
Cinnamon Girl
Like A Hurricane
Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
Tonight’s The Night

From the ‘Rust Never Sleeps’ Tour, one day after the Movie and official release was filmed and recorded in San Francisco, Ca.

Neil Young – guitar, piano, vocals
Frank Sampedro – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Billy Talbot – bass, vocals
Ralph Molina – drums, vocals

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The Midnight Cafe’s Notes:

I feel like I’m a broken record when I repeat that I have trouble reviewing Neil’s acoustic sets. The thing is, I like them. I like these songs, and Neil plays them well. But they rarely sound all that different to me. Is one version of “I Am A Child” better than another? Probably. If you lined them all up, you could probably pick out some really good versions, but a random listen usually turns up a good one that sounds pretty much like most of the rest of them.

The sound is good, but there is a lot of crowd noise. It isn’t like an audience recording where you can hear some dumbo behind the taper just chatting away, but there is a lot of random clapping and cheering during the acoustic set. It makes me wonder if something was going on onstage or elsewhere. Was Neil or someone else doing something worth cheering for? Or maybe they just really love certain lines in the songs. It is a bit distracting, but not a big deal, really.

I do love when Neil plays piano during the solo sets. He does a very nice version of “After the Gold Rush” here.

“My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” is good. Neil gets really into this song with some nice guitar work, and then he keeps repeating “Hey, hey, my my…” several times at the end.

The electric set starts with “When You Dance You Can Really Love,” and it is a good one. It has this wonderful little solo. “Welfare Mothers” finds the whole band getting into a rowdy little groove

I love the Crazy Horse sound. When they are good (and they are often very good), they are so loud, raucous, rowdy, and wild. They sound like they could go off the rails at any moment, but they manage to keep the train just on the tracks.

“Needle and the Damage Done” is just Neil again on acoustic guitar, which seems weird. Before the song, you can hear someone – an announcer, maybe; I can’t tell – saying something about getting off the towers. I’m guessing some audience members were climbing on something, causing safety issues. I’m guessing again that this caused Neil to just play by himself for a minute until whatever was going on got cleared up.

“Cortez the Killer” is one of my favorite Neil songs. He’s got a few songs like this where his band will find this groove and then just play it and play it while Neil is laying down big guitar riffs until they transcend space and time. They absolutely nail it here, with the riffs growing bigger and bigger until they just explode. Neil uses a strange kind of clipped vocal that sounds slightly Jamaican for some reason.

“Cinnamon Girl” is loud and ragged and surprisingly short. We get the completed couplet with “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black” which always rocks. Before the encore of “Tonight’s the Night,” someone- I’m guessing a local DJ comes out and sputters some nonsense about Rust Never Sleeping and how “Tonight is the night,” while also seemingly berating them for not buying that album enough. The song is played pretty darn good, though.

Overall, this is a darn good concert. Turn it up and play it loud.

Once a Thief (1965)

Once a Thief

Ever since Eddie Pedak (Alain Delon) got out of prison six years ago, he’s been straight as an arrow. He’s married to Kristine (Ann Margret) and has a cute-as-a-button little girl. He’s got a good job. He’s happy.

Except for Detective Mike Vido (Van Heflin). He got shot trying to catch a thief several years back, and he’s certain it was Eddie who did it. But the culprit was wearing a mas and Mike only saw his eyes, so the courts let Eddie go. Ever since, Mike has had it out for Eddie and is constantly trying to prove that he’s committed various crimes.

When a store robbery goes bad and a woman is killed, Mike thinks he’s got Eddie dead to rights. A witness description matches Eddie, and he was seen in the exact type of coat Eddie wears, and he drove away in the same model car. Mike takes him in, but his witness says it wasn’t Eddie who did it.

Meanwhile, Eddie gets a visit from his brother Walter (Jack Palance), a man who has definitely not given up the gangster life. He says he’s got a job for Eddie, something that pays big for just a day’s work. Eddie says, “No.” He doesn’t do that work anymore.

But then Eddie gets fired from his job. Mike told his boss about his past. This has happened before. Eddie has trouble finding a new job. Kristine has to take a job as a waitress. She tells Eddie she’s slinging hamburgers, but really she’s a cocktail waitress at some nightclub. She has to wear a skimpy thing.

This drives Eddie crazy. He is supposed to be the breadwinner. He’s not supposed to wash the dishes and make sure the kid is in bed on time. I always find these things fascinating. I guess I’m what you’d call a modern man. My wife and I take turns cooking. I wash dishes. I fold laundry. For a few years, I was a house husband while my wife worked. I was a stay-at-home dad for the first three years of our daughter’s life. I liked it. I don’t really understand these forced issues of masculinity.

But I do understand that it is a thing. It was a much bigger thing in the 1960s, and people like Eddie felt emasculated when they couldn’t work. But it doesn’t exactly make me feel for Eddie. It doesn’t put me on his side. It is fun to watch Delon in this role. I’m so used to him as the icy cool guy from his French films; to see him so hot with emotion here is interesting. He also has a tender side, too. He dotes on the girl, and he is tender with his wife. His character is also Italian, which is just weird.

You can probably tell where this story is going. The film does a nice job with it. Heflin is good as the cop. He’s obsessed with Eddie, but he’s also got a detective’s instincts and knows when he’s made a mistake. Palance is menacing. John Davis Chandler is the dark, kinky sidekick that always seems to be in this type of film. He’s terrifying.

Ann Margret is a little too weepy and screachy for my tastes. But the rest of the film more than makes up for it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Lust of the Vampire (1957)

Lust of the Vampire

During Mussolini’s reign, the government tightly controlled the Italian film industry. Only films deemed appropriate were allowed to be made. After the war ended, the industry grew exponentially, so by the mid-1950s, they were starting to make films that might appeal to an international audience. In 1956, director Riccardo Freda decided it was time to make a horror film. This would be Italy’s first horror film since the silent era. He made I Vampiri (or The Devil’s Commandment and Lust of the Vampire as it was called overseas) on the cheap with a shooting schedule of just two weeks. He hired his friend Mario Bava as cinematographer and special effects man. Two days before the shoot was scheduled to end, something happened, and Freda dropped out. Bava stepped in and completed the film, making substantial changes to the script.

This makes Lust of the Vampire an important film in the history of Italian cinema. I wish I could say it made it a great film, but the story is lacking. It does, however, look amazing. You can see Bava’s fingerprints all over it.

In Paris, beautiful women keep turning up dead with their blood completely drained out. The local press dubs the killer a vampire.

Sometimes we follow a reporter trying to find the vampire. Sometimes we follow Dr. Julien du Grand (Antoine Balpêtré), a scientist experimenting on corpses to find the secret to eternal life. And then there is Giselle du Grand (Gianna Maria Canale). She lives in a castle and is loosely based on Elizabeth Bathory, the real-life Hungarian noblewoman and accused serial killer who, they say, used to bathe in the blood of virgins. Our Giselle doesn’t do any bathing, but she does drink the blood of her victims, which keeps her young and beautiful.

Truthfully, it has been a long, weird week, and I was very tired while watching this. I watched it in my bedroom, lying on my bed. I nearly fell asleep. As such, I had trouble following the plot. But from the reviews I’ve read, everyone has trouble following the plot. It isn’t a well-written story.

But it looks amazing. Mario Bava filmed it in black and white, and he was a master at playing with light and shadow. They say they used only existing sets, but they found some good ones. Giselle’s castle is fantastic-looking. Bava gives it a wonderful atmospheric and gothic feel. They do some great effects with Giselle. They applied makeup in different colors and then applied different filters for different moments. This would reveal (or conceal) different makeup effects, causing her to age and become more grotesque.

It is very much worth watching, especially if you are a Bava fan (and why wouldn’t you be?)

The White Lioness by Henning Mankell

the white lioness

I have become a pretty big fan of what is sometimes called Nordic Noir. These are crime dramas set in Scandinavia that usually have a bleak vibe and a noirish feel. I’ve read several of the books and watched a few of the cinematic and television adaptations.

Kurt Wallander is a character created by Swedish author Henning Mankell. His stories have been adapted numerous times, most notably as a Swedish TV series and a British one starring Kenneth Branagh.

I think I’ve seen the first episode of both series. I think I liked them, but not well enough to keep up with them. I’m always getting distracted.

A while back, I was in Gardner’s, my favorite Tulsa bookshop, and I came across some of the Wallander books. They didn’t have the first one in the series, so I more or less grabbed this one at random. Probably because it has a cool cover featuring an X-ray of a pistol.

I liked The White Lioness, but I didn’t love it.

Wallander is your fairly typical noir detective. He’s good at his job, but not a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes with an almost supernatural mental ability. He’s dogged about it; once he locks into a case, he drops everything else in his life to solve it. So he doesn’t have much of a personal life, and what he does has is in shambles. He tends to do things his own way, not by the book. This causes him some trouble at the office. But he solves his cases, so he’s mostly left to it.

This story begins with a missing person. An elderly, very religious woman has disappeared. She was a realtor, and before she went missing, she was supposed to be checking out a potential house to sell. It is located way out in the boonies, and as Wallander is looking for it, a nearby house explodes. They discover some odd radio equipment inside and the severed finger of a black man in the yard.

Sweden apparently doesn’t have a large African population, so this seems very strange. Especially since they do not find the rest of the body, and the finger was clearly severed with a blade and didn’t come off from the explosion.

Finding the missing woman, figuring out why someone would blow up a house out in the middle of nowhere, and what happened to the rest of that man are all good mysteries. Figuring out if they are at all connected could make for a great story.

But then the book more or less solves the mysteries within the next few chapters. It switches from Wallander’s perspective to several South Africans. The book was written not long after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, during some massive political changes in the country.

In this story, several white supremacists don’t like those changes and work on a conspiracy to assassinate a prominent person, which will throw the country into chaos. The finger belongs to a potential assassin who was sent to Sweden to be trained by a former Russian KGB agent.

For the rest of the book, we’ll switch back and forth between Wallander trying to solve the mystery we already know the answer to and what’s going on with the assassin and the people who have hired him. And then once Wallander figures out what’s going on, it becomes a race to stop the assassination from happening.

I find I’m not a big fan of mysteries that solve the crime early. I don’t usually want to see things from the killer’s perspective and know what they did and how they did it before the final chapters. That destroys the mystery. Turning it from a whodunnit into a will our hero catch them before it’s too late isn’t nearly as interesting.

Usually. There are lots of exceptions to that rule. A well-done story can still make me enjoy it even if I know who the killer is from the get-go.

I think part of my problem here is that while this is the third Wallander book to be written, it is my first to read. I’m still getting to know the character, so every time it switched away from him, I was annoyed.

But I also just didn’t find the South African stuff that interesting. I wonder if some of that might be that Mankell is a white Swedish man writing about South African apartheid and that just doesn’t feel right. You can tell he’s done his research, and he’s trying to do the story justice, but it never quite connected.

But I do really like the Wallander character, and I’ll definitely be checking out more of his stories.