This article contains spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a distinctive film, a mix of surreal postmodernism, gender critique, and surprising humor. It’s also a celebration of ’80s slashers, filled with references to movies that most people dismiss as tasteless trash, even if icons like Jason and Freddy remain in the popular culture.The specificity in those references reveals Schoenbrun’s deep love for subgenre, as does the movie itself. Among the many other things it does spectacularly well, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma also argues for the value of trashy slasher movies, despite (or maybe because of) their problematic material. So if the argument convinces you to check out more nasty little horror movies from the era, here’s a guide to the most important movies referenced in Schoenbrun’s movie.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Friday the 13thThe single most important movie for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is 1980’s Friday the 13th, and its various sequels. Slasher movies existed before Friday the 13th, most notably the 1978 John Carpenter and Debra Hill movie Halloween. Once Halloween made huge profits on a small budget, studios clamored to cash in with their own stories about holiday-themed killers, and producer/director Sean S. Cunningham got in on the action. Nothing about Friday the 13th matched the skill of Halloween. But the story of camp counselors getting killed by what may be the ghost of the boy who drowned there years ago did big box office numbers, and a franchise was born.Camp Miasma, the movie-within-the-movie of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, obviously draws inspiration from Friday the 13th, as it too has a drowned boy at its center. Camp Miasma also borrows the other most notorious thing from Friday the 13th, lots of scenes of teens and young adults partying and having sex, complete with shots of nude women designed for the male gaze. In particular, the scene of the killer Little Death (Jack Haven) running his spear through final girl Billy (Amanda Fix as a young woman, Gillian Anderson as an adult) while she has sex with Alex (Arthur Conti) comes directly from Friday the 13th Part II.Part II also saw the death of Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), another element Schoenbrun references. Crazy Ralph appears in the first two Friday movies, each time warning the counselors about the “death curse” on Camp Crystal Lake, before he gets killed by Jason as well. In the fictional Camp Miasma, a shopkeeper called Rudolph performs that role, played by David Lynch regular Patrick Fischler.Other Friday the 13th sequels get references throughout Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, particularly in their covers and subtitles. Notably, Kris (Hannah Einbinder) gets a DVD copy of Camp Miasma Part VI: A New Beginning, which she calls a return to form for the franchise. That wasn’t the case with Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, a misfire that tried to replace Jason with another killer. But it was the case for Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives!, which brought the masked murderer back as a zombie.Sleepaway CampThe other major influence on the fictional Camp Miasma gets referenced almost immediately, during the opening title credits that establish the history of the franchise. As the sequence ends, we see shots of online think pieces reclaiming the transphobic ending of the original film.That reclamation project recalls similar work done on 1983’s Sleepaway Camp, a truly inexplicable movie written and directed by Robert Hiltzik. Structurally, Sleepaway Camp follows the standard slasher pattern, in which campers around a summer camp end up dead in spectacular ways. But in the movie’s final moments, we discover not only that the killer is the shy girl Angela (Felissa Rose), but that she was born Peter and was raised as a girl by her Aunt Martha. The final shot of the movie, in which a nude Angela stands up to reveal her penis, is treated like a horrifying shock.Sleepaway Camp is hardly the only slasher movie to treat gender identity as a reason to kill. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1960’s Psycho, the grandfather of the genre, in which Norman Bates’ psychosis drove him to dress like his mother. But Sleepaway Camp most explicitly made gender-nonconformity into something monstrous. Despite this fact, critics have reclaimed the queerness in Sleepaway Camp, not unlike the fictional fans of Camp Miasma.Obviously, both Schoenbrun and their main character Kris love Sleepaway Camp, as the latter talks about not only the first movie, but also the two sequels starring Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela as Angela.A Nightmare on Elm StreetSchoenbrun has made no secret of their love of the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. But the high-concept dreamscapes of Wes Craven‘s 1984 film has far more ambition than slashers like Camp Miasma. However, Schoenbrun does work in a few references to Freddy Krueger. The most obvious comes when Kris takes a meeting with producers, who constantly compare her Camp Miasma reboot to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Released in 1994, New Nightmare operated as something of a first draft for Scream. New Nightmare starred Heather Langenkamp not as Nancy, the final girl she played in the first movie. Rather, she plays herself, as do Robert Englund and Craven himself. According to New Nightmare, Freddy is in fact a real dream demon who influenced the creation of the 1984 movie. As Freddy became more silly on screen, the demon’s strength weakened, so he begins attacking the creators in the real world to make the world fear him again.One of the things that made the “actual” Freddy so angry also gets a nod in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. During the opening credits, we see that Little Death became a not-scary public figure who spoke out against drugs and even cut a rap album. The same thing happened in our world, as Freddy Krueger had a 900-number, did a rap song with the Fat Boys, and even appeared on the 1987 novelty album Freddy’s Greatest Hits. However, as anyone who remembers Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare can tell you, Freddy left the anti-drug PSAs to Johnny Depp.Amityville 3D, Hellraiser: Bloodline, and Silent Night, Deadly NightDuring the title sequence, we get a glimpse at some of the later Camp Miasma sequels, all with high concepts that suggests producers were getting desperate to keep Little Death relevant past the ’80s. The fourth Camp Miasma film embraces 3D tech, while a much later movie sends Little Death to space. Both of these things also happened to Jason Voorhees, who finally got his famed hockey mask in the 3D movie Friday the 13th Part III and who slaughtered teens on a spaceship in Jason X.But the Camp Miasma versions have more in common with films from other franchises, neither of which are really slashers. The cover for Camp Miasma IV features a hand reaching out of the screen and toward the viewer. That’s almost exactly the poster for 1983’s Amityville 3D, which embraced the era’s 3D craze and also featured a young Meg Ryan. The sci-fi Camp Miasma movie seems to be from the 1990s, which means that it’s not exactly like 2001’s Jason X. Instead, the images bring to mind 1996’s Hellraiser: Bloodline, which has scenes in the present and the past (in which a young Adam Scott plays as a devious French dandy), but is most famous for scenes of someone solving the Lament Configuration in deep space.The last desperate genre hop made by the Camp Miasma franchise doesn’t match anything from Friday the 13th, but it does at least mirror a slasher movie. Camp Miasma producers made a holiday-themed horror movie, complete with Little Death in a Santa cap. To date, Terrifier 3 is the most well-known slasher movie to do a holiday-themed sequel and dress its killer like Santa, but that’s too recent for Camp Miasma to reference. Instead, Schoenbrun’s probably thinking of 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, a mean-spirited film that horrified critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who already hated slashers.Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in theaters worldwideThe post Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: A Guide to the Slasher References appeared first on Den of Geek.