The Watchers: BUDDY and TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Two new horror pictures play like media studies seminars. That they manage to be both archly artificial genre commentary and functional entertainments makes for a fun time at the movies. Take Buddy, for instance. It has a great premise. What if there was an episode of Barney where the kid characters start to suspect Barney is a murderer? I can imagine a lot of ways for this hook to go awry. But there’s a total aesthetic commitment to the bit that makes the movie. It plays as a loop of episodes, squared-off, shot-on-video, late-90’s in look and feel. Everything from the primary-color sets, simple melodies, and vintage fashions down to the Comic Sans credits is just right. Buddy is a seemingly affable big orange unicorn mascot, living in a clubhouse on an astroturf soundstage. There he sings songs with and dispenses advice for a small group of kids. There’s a talking mailbox, a bunny in overalls, a nurse, a postman, and a googly-eyed train car. So far so normally absurd. That Buddy’s a murderer slowly reveals itself over the first episode, each subsequent entry becoming more deranged as the kids have to fight back and try to escape. The convincing mix of the form and content sells the curdled nostalgia at its core. 

It becomes a movie about the hidden abuses lurking beneath seemingly innocent programming, an exploded metaphor about what it feels like to watch an old show with fresh knowledge about behind-the-scenes nastiness. (Anyone successfully get through rewatching any random 20-year-old episode of a Nickelodeon sitcom since the documentary about creepy behavior toward those child stars?) The movie’s total absorption in its look and tone, like a nightmare you’d have after falling asleep on the couch with the TV on in the middle of the night, makes sense as the work of writer-director Casper Kelly. You might remember his short film Too Many Cooks, which was a viral sensation in 2014. That was a pitch perfect parody of 80s family sitcom theme songs that went on and on, mutating genres until it broke through the fourth wall into a slasher picture that finally collapsed in existential dread and apocalyptic context collapse. Buddy is a feature length version of the same impulse, stretched out with a few choice intentional swerves out of the style to create some breathing room, but always returning to the chamber of absurdity where laughs of incredulity accompany each splash of blood. 

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is a similar hall of horror mirrors, a long self-reflexive trance state. It’s also about what it’s like to like horror movies, even, and especially, bad ones. It understands the strange formative psychic tremors that the right movie at the right time has on one’s sense of self. Star Hannah Einbinder plays a young director tasked with remaking a problematic cult slasher classic: Camp Miasma. Like the Friday the 13th franchise with a soupçon of Sleepaway Camp, it has a gender-bending villain named Little Death who perpetually wakes up from beneath the lake and goes on a killing spree. Einbinder’s earnest, awkward filmmaker is told to bring the dormant franchise’s views on gender up to date. Flush with an idea, she travels to find the reclusive star of the original (Gillian Anderson with an imperious honey-fried accent) in hopes of talking her into appearing in the reboot. The older woman lives at the abandoned summer camp that was the movie’s filming location. Now, in a matte-painting winter in the middle of nowhere, they have a tense meeting of increasingly entangled psychosexual conversation and bodily awareness. 

In the film’s centerpiece of reflexivity, the two have a discussion about gender, identity, perspective—and sex and violence, or, as the actress says, “flesh and fluids”—before and after screening the original picture. It becomes a film within a film that then further abstracts into muddled memories and flashbacks and sequences. Some feel authentically 80s in their scuzzy graininess. Others get slippery with anachronisms, half-remembered impressions rich with emotional baggage. They embody how horror fans toggle their identification between victim and predator, the penetrated and the perpetrator. If it all sounds artsy and academic, so it is. But it’s also so physical and fraught in its tensions between its leads that it’s hard to shake its dark undertow of confusion and discovery. It’s also constantly winking with meta asides, puncturing but not deflating the heavy mood. If you saw Schoenbrun’s other films you’re familiar with this sense of one’s identity tangled up in the media they consume. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a vulnerable teenage girl gets lost in a spiral of internet influence. In I Saw the TV Glow, lonely teenagers get lost in the lore of a cult series that connects them. Another allegory of displacement and discovery, this new film is their broadest and narrowest, an intimate exposure and disclosure between two women desperate to filter the voids in their lives through the art that shapes them and drives them to new insights into their minds and bodies.