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Horror is surely the most deconstructed genre in film, the slasher the most deconstructed subgenre therein, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may be the most deconstructy of all such cinematic deconstructions. It tells the story of a young, queer, indie filmmaker hired to resurrect a problematic slasher series of yesteryear, the Camp Miasma films, which feature a box-headed villain who periodically emerges from a lake to murder teens who are drinking too much and forcing themselves on each other. Attempting to decide what she wants her reboot to be, she revisits the first film and meets its reclusive star, the enigmatic look in whose eye, in that first film, she’s desperate to understand.

Mike gets on with Teenage Sex and Death; José does not. What José finds cutesy and aimless, Mike sees originality and charm in. Schoenbrun is keen to have their cake and eat it, building in criticism of Gen Z-esque reevaluations of old media by modern standards while engaging in them all the same. This is a film loaded with irony – but its love of its subject matter is obvious.

It’s easy to argue that Teenage Sex and Death is at odds with itself when its former final girl (a delightfully drawling, glamorous Gillian Anderson) encourages the visiting filmmaker to cast off her intellectual pretensions and simply enjoy the “flesh and fluids”, but it’s a film that has plenty of room for ambiguity and blurring of the lines between points of view, and reality, media and fantasy. To some, the ambiguities will be approached as a problem to solve – just what is reality and what isn’t, at the end of the day? – but for Mike, they’re Schoenbrun’s way of following Anderson’s advice.

It’s not a perfect film and there will be those to whom it fails to speak at all (one of them is on this podcast), but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is at the very least interesting, and an eager addition to the groaning shelves of self-referential horror media.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.