All great horror movie franchises go through a similar life cycle. The breakout hit. The surprisingly good sequel that expands the mythology in questionable ways. The godawful third, fourth, or fifth movie that drives even the hardcore fans away. And the eventual reboot/remake/requel or whatever the kids in the next Scream movie will call it.
For Jane Schoenbrun, there’s one more rule when it comes to making a long-running horror franchise:
“If you keep the shitty horror franchise running long enough, eventually, they’re probably gonna go to space.”
Schoenbrun took a similar approach in creating the fictional Camp Miasma horror franchise, which exists as a popular slasher film series within the world of their new movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The film stars Hannah Einbinder as a rising director (and Schoenbrun stand-in) who is tasked by Hollywood with reviving the Camp Miasma franchise and sets out to recruit its reclusive original Final Girl (played by Gillian Anderson). Along the way, the lines between realities bend and break as the story takes on a logic of its own informed by Schoenbrun’s clear passion for the horror genre.
Nowhere is that passion more evident than in the opening credits, which play over a series of visuals used to establish and explore the Camp Miasma franchise. We see a stack of videotapes with titles like Camp Miasma Part V: The Final Chapter, Camp Miasma Part VI: New Beginning, and Miasma 3000 (the outer space one). Other shots reveal various Camp Miasma merchandise (an arcade cabinet, a Halloween costume, a fully functioning board game), along with countless movie posters, newspaper articles, blog posts, and online forums devoted to the Camp Miasma-verse. The space where this all exists is never defined, but it quickly establishes the world Schoenbrun is about to plunge us into. Ironically, it wasn’t created until the rest of the movie had already been filmed, giving the team plenty of time to create this unofficial Miasma museum.
“We shot that opening credit sequence on the last day,” Schoenbrun tells Polygon. “So the whole time we were making the movie, they were essentially building a museum. It was almost like a second movie. They were making up all this merch. That’s just a testament to having people who are in it for joy and love.”
While the movie that follows is a hilarious, gory, self-referential wormhole of meta-horror comedy, I was particularly impressed by the opening credits, which feel like a gift specifically made for horror fans who will instantly know which Nightmare on Elm Street movie Camp Miasma Part VII: Psychic Warriors is riffing on or which franchise inspired the Camp Miasma video game. So ahead of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma‘s release, I checked in with Schoenbrun to unpack some of the best details from that sequence, paired with some exclusive images from the scene provided to Polygon for this article.
Naming the Camp Miasma movies
Schoenbrun and their team came up with most of the Miasma sequel titles in a single session where they riffed on the names of their favorite horror movies.
“Some of it was in the script, but much of the actual detail work of that scene came through right before production,” they say. “Just me closing my office door and sitting all day with my core creative team. It was like a pop-up writers’ room.”
Psychic Warrior, some would say, is the nadir of the series.
The overall goal was to introduce audiences to the Camp Miasma franchise and its iconic villain, Little Death, who wears a large vent over their head and impales victims with an oversized spear. However, the scene also gave Schoenbrun an opportunity to introduce one of the core ideas of the movie: that capitalism (and the movie industry specifically) is both cartoonishly evil and cartoonishly funny. The fact that Schoenbrun and the target audience are both deeply familiar with the movies the scene riffs on was an added bonus.
“The language of the franchise is something we all culturally understand, but we don’t realize how fun it is to play with,” Schoenbrun says. “It’s almost episodic. It’s like watching a franchise go off the rails, then watching the first attempt to reboot it well, and then the second. You can imagine the maps of when the continuity gets reset back to the first film over and over again like some of these movies have done now a few times. It becomes a really fun way to tell jokes, and a really fun way to talk about our late capitalist IP hellscape. Like, do we really need the 15th Halloween reboot?”
Like, do we really need the 15th Halloween reboot?
To dig into a few specific examples, there’s Part VIII: Little Death Takes Manhattan (a nod to Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan). The ironic evolution from Part V: The Final Chapter to Part VI: New Beginning is also a tribute to the Friday the 13th franchise.
One of the funniest titles, Little Death vs. Sleepy Man, came directly from that pop-up writers’ room.
“We knew we needed one more,” Schoenbrun recalls, “and I was like, ‘OK, we need, like, a versus movie. There’s Freddy vs. Jason. There’s Alien vs. Predator. Who can Little Death fight?’ Someone in that room suggested Sleepy Man, and I thought that was really funny.”
As for Miasma 3000, Schoenbrun says it’s a tribute to every horror franchise that eventually felt the need to send its killer into space, though their favorite example comes as a surprise.
“I rewatched Jason X not too long ago,” Schoenbrun says. “It’s a fun one, honestly. David Cronenberg shows up at the end. But I feel like my favorite is Leprechaun 4: In Space.”
One moment in the opening credits also reveals that Psychic Warriors won a Razzie award for worst movie of the year, which begs the question: What is the worst Camp Miasma movie of all time?
“I think that’s up for debate,” Schoenbrun says. “I don’t have a worst one. Psychic Warriors, some would say, is the nadir of the series. The Christmas-themed one might also be pretty bleak. And then Manhattan and the space one crossed that threshold from miserable slogs into so bad it’s good territory. My guess is that the ranking is kind of like the Friday the 13th rankings. You only get to the entries that aren’t terrible towards the very top of the pile.”
Camp Miasma merch
Beyond that stack of VHS tapes, the unofficial Camp Miasma museum is full of physical merch created to celebrate the fictional franchise. Schoenbrun praises the production and props teams for bringing these items to life, sometimes without even being told to.
“They were like literal magicians,” Schoenbrun says.
Their work includes framed movie posters, a wind-up Little Death toy, and a playable board game with a full set of rules.
“Someone in the art department wrote a rule book for and designed a real board game,” Schoenbrun says. “When I found that out, I was like, ‘Even if we only see it for one frame, that deserves to be in the movie because someone literally wrote these rules.'”
There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the NES Friday the 13th video game from 1989. Schoenbrun admits to regularly watching playthrough videos of the game on YouTube. However, one of their favorite physical gags from the opening sequence is a riff on another classic horror trope: the off-brand Halloween costume.
“One joke that I’m proud of in there is that it’s not just a Little Death Halloween costume that’s sold at Party City,” they say. “They couldn’t get the rights to Little Death, and so it says Air Vent Man.”
Headlines and quick bites
Schoenbrun and the rest of the team also filled the credits sequence with fake newspaper headlines and blog posts to flesh out the world of Camp Miasma even more.
“My favorite is something about Little Death Day being canceled at the Chicago Zoo,” Schoenbrun says. “That one I’m proud of.”
They also took inspiration from old horror movie fansites.
“We just spent hours together looking at old GeoCities websites for Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th fan sites that just had these archives of vintage merch,” Schoenbrun says. “These photo galleries that have probably been online for 20 years and put up by just some fan who was a collector.”
On the flip side, there’s also a somewhat more timely joke about the modern internet of just a few years ago. Another fake headline proclaims that the Camp Miasma spinoff for the short-lived streaming service Quibi has been canceled.
“Every now and again, I’ll walk by a sandwich board outside a cafe or something that’ll say, ‘Come in for a quick bite,’ and I’m like, ‘Ooh, a Quibi,'” Schoenbrun says. “So it kinda wrote itself. Of course, we gotta go for the cheap Quibi joke.”
Bonus: The future of the Camp Miasma franchise
Schoenbrun hasn’t made a sequel movie yet (despite inventing over a dozen of them for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma), but they do have one idea for how to expand this franchise IRL.
I want to make a cartoon.
“I want to make a cartoon,” Schoenbrun says. “Like an ABC Saturday morning cartoon called Toonage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. That’s the next iteration.”
