Starting with the original in Camp Miasma in 1980, the horror franchise went on to have a long life. There were multiple sequels, spinoffs in the form of arcade cabinets and board games, and just about every kind of merchandise you can think of, from alarm clocks and lunch boxes to Halloween costumes and action figures. It got so popular there were even knockoff costumes at party stores. For several decades the franchise exerted a powerful, albeit dwindling, impact on the world of horror. But if you haven’t heard of Camp Miasma, that’s okay, because it doesn’t really exist. It’s a fictional franchise at the heart of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the latest film from I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun.
In order to convince audiences that Camp Miasma — an ongoing saga about a character called Little Death who terrorizes a summer camp — could be real, the production designers had to create a whole lot of objects that detailed the movie franchise’s fake history. “We probably could’ve spent three years only making stuff for Camp Miasma if those were the marching orders,” says production designer Matt Hyland.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma tells the story of a budding director named Kris (Hannah Einbinder) who has been given the green light to reboot the long-dormant Camp Miasma franchise. Before doing so, she decides to meet up with Billy (Gillian Anderson), the final girl from the first film in the series, who has spent decades isolated in the woods. Kris tries to convince Billy to join the project, and from there the two go on an intimate journey, where they connect over sex, slasher movies, and KFC.
Image: Mubi
But before that, there’s Camp Miasma. The film — the real one — wastes no time in quickly telling the history of the franchise during the title sequence. Through old movie posters, VHS tapes, toys, photographs, and even film reviews and news articles, you learn how the series started off strong before steadily dwindling, going from box office success to direct-to-video dreck over the span of around 30 years. Those objects become a powerful and efficient tool — though the process of creating them wasn’t quite so quick and efficient.
First, the designers spent a long time doing research, looking at existing slasher series like Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween in order to get a sense of how those films looked and how they permeated culture at large. From there, they made a kind of historical document, informed by Schoenbrun’s script, which outlined the entire existence of Camp Miasma: when each movie came out, who directed it, how it was received, and what kind of merchandise was released. Then they sat down with the director in order to figure out what items they actually needed to tell this story. “We locked ourselves in a room with Jane and the cinematographer and mapped out the sequence beat by beat, and every beat was an object we needed to fabricate,” explains Brandon Tonner-Connolly, the film’s other production designer.
Image: Mubi
Most of the items only appear on screen for a brief moment, but the work that went into them was extensive regardless. The Camp Miasma board game, for instance, is fully playable, with a complete set of instructions. Even something seemingly simple, like VHS boxes or movie posters, took a lot of effort: The team had to not only determine how they should look, but also make sure to include information like the production and distribution companies and the film’s tagline. That work was necessary to create a level of believability, even if the object in question only had a fleeting moment on camera.
“You can’t make decisions based on screentime,” says Hyland. “If it’s a board game, we’re making a board game, even if it’s on camera for half a second. That’s a resource challenge. It’s part of our process to assign priorities to things. But the truth is that Jane is so full of ideas and very excited, and gets us very excited, so that unlike other movies, this felt like a pencils-down moment. We just wanted to keep making stuff and coming up with ideas, and we only stopped because the camera was ready and we simply ran out of time.”
Image: Mubi
The attention to detail was also in part a nod to fans. “Jane has such an incredible following that you know that people will pause the movie and read the review, or read the instructions for the board game,” adds Tonner-Connolly. That meant ensuring everything was consistent; the team made multiple tie-in lunch boxes, for instance, and made sure the designs were different to reflect if they would’ve been released in 1983 versus 1997.
Nailing the details was important, but the duo also say that their goal wasn’t to 100 percent re-create existing designs and slap the Camp Miasma name on them. Instead, the objects “needed to look and feel like the memory of watching” those movies. According to Tonner-Connolly, it’s the same approach that was used on I Saw the TV Glow, which similarly had a story revolving around a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style ’90s drama. “We know that we’re technically proficient enough to exactly replicate these [classic slasher movies], but what we’re actually interested in is relying on these fragmented memories of childhood, and how things are remembered and misremembered,” he explains. “We wanted to play with those emotions and create this new thing.”
It’s that combination of detail and emotional resonance that allows the film to tell Camp Miasma’s multi-decade history with just a handful of snapshots. And that helps make everything in the rest of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — which includes a long sequence pulled straight out of the film that started it all — feel grounded in something that seems real before taking more fantastical turns. “It’s hard to convince an audience that for the last 30 years this thing has been in the cultural conversation,” says Hyland. “People can smell a phony pretty quickly.”
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in theaters on August 7th.
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