Einbinder plays Kris, a smart, ambitious filmmaker who’s been hired to direct a reboot of a popular 1990s slasher franchise in which a crazed serial killer wearing a helmet shaped like a ceiling vent terrorizes teens at a remote summer camp. The killer—played by Jack Haven, who also appeared in Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow—is known as Little Death, a not-so-subtle nod to the French nickname for that fleetingly blissful postcoital loss of consciousness, and his game is skewering his victims with a big, pointy, phallic lance: they scream performatively as geysers of candy-apple-red translucent blood spurts from their sternums. Little Death has a a crazy backstory, rendered in clumsy, non-ideologically correct 1990s terms: he couldn’t decide if he was a girl or a boy, and a group of bullying male campers drowned him in a lake. In the Camp Miasma mythos, Little Death, wearing not just his customary helmet but also a kind of shimmery rubber onesie, emerges from the murky lake waters at opportune times, generally waiting until his teenage victims are in flagrante before moving in for the kill. The Camp Miasma films—the first one spawned a jillion sequels before the franchise was deemed “problematic” and retired—are all about, as one character puts it here, “flesh and fluids.”
Read the full article here
