There’s more than a hint of smug industry insiderism to Jane Schoenbrun’s all-too self-aware slasher flick, but not so much that it gets in the way of Schoenbrun’s keen-eyed look at a far more complex and relevant topic: the cultural and commercial hegemony of the film franchise, and how it divides the generations that merely grew up with them versus those that came of age in a world absolutely dominated by them.
An ode to movie-watching as much as it is to movie-making, Miasma follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young filmmaker who grew up obsessed with the fictional titular horror franchise. The title credits are set to close-ups of fake memorabilia detailing all the highs and lows that real franchises seem to go through with metronomic similarity: it begins with a box-office smash, then increasingly redundant sequels, followed by a kind of generational revisit and revival until it becomes a cult institution leading to the inevitable gritty reboot.
Kris has now been offered the chance to helm a new instalment of the franchise. Her diligence and loyalty to the history of the films lead her to cast Billy (Gillian Anderson), a largely forgotten scream queen from the original film. Their consequent exchanges, which form both the intellectual and emotional meat of Miasma, posit them as archetypes within their generations of both movie-makers and movie-goers.
While Miasma ultimately dissolves into some kind of hyper-ironic metamodernist nightmare of a self-parody within a self-parody, it also very intelligently addresses how kids watch what adults make with soul, and then attempt to dissect and recreate it with words and methodical intent. Kris babbles on about the original film’s academic relevance (perhaps in the exact same way that this film review is trying to intellectualise something as gratuitously campy as Miasma), while Billy dismisses it all as simply “flesh and fluids.” Billy, in turn, is dismissed at one point as being a typical Gen-Xer, presumably in her implied grumblings about the lack of soul in modern filmmaking. What was to Billy a simple attempt at provocation and titillation has become the basis for Kris’s entire intellectual world. It’s the need of the old to put the young into the moment, instead of standing outside oneself looking in.
What unites Billy and Kris is their view that there is true artistry at work in the original film, an actual ‘soul’ of human truth and feeling that a more highbrow assessment would refuse to acknowledge.
As a franchise-obsessed film buff who is less than a year older than Jane Schoenbrun, Miasma held painful levels of self-recognition and self-awareness for me, right down to the part where my current creative work (writing sci-fi) is an attempt at creating a franchise-style universe of my own. It’s literally all our generation knows, and I think there’s a loving statement somewhere within Miasma about how there is real beauty to be found in franchise, beyond that which its owners want to charge you money for.
To Schoenbrun (and to me) part of the fascination with franchises is not just its interior world, but also how a franchise has evolved over time to reflect media around it, and produced any number of half-forgotten bastard children, studied and remembered solely for being runts in a more productive litter. At one point in Miasma, Kris snags a used copy of a less-remembered Camp Miasma sequel on DVD at a gas station. She instantly recognises it and recites a barrage of trivia on it to her friend over the phone, all the while acknowledging that it’s a mostly terrible film.
The bulk of Miasma, however, is less scalpel than blunt instrument. There’s a fetishisation of anachronistic video technology which, while very justified in an era dominated by streaming, comes off as fairly played. The dialogue jumps the shark from pithy to parody and back again so many times that it’s impossible to say where its heart lies, and then there’s the by-now standard bloodfest set to soft rock that one has come to expect at the movies. Another of its multitude of strange ironies is how a film that invented its own film franchise just to prove a point also chooses to litter itself with references and appearances of real-world restaurants and candy, which to me softens the point it’s trying to make… or maybe it’s all ironic?
Maybe Miasma tries to be just a few too many things all at once. It eventually succumbs to perhaps its weakest side: that of wish-fulfillment. Kris is coddled, comforted and seduced by the woman who instigated her sexual awakening as a young girl, who also inexplicably shares her exact appetites for chicken, weed and candy (not to mention being portrayed by a real-life sci-fi/horror TV bombshell). The fact that the sex scene that so titillated pre-teen Kris is later revealed to be unsimulated and non-consensual underscores Miasma’s blithe acceptance of pornographic objectification as a possible basis for real love, a concept as “problematic” as any of the anti-trans messages found in the original Camp Miasma films and the real-world horror films whose pockets Miasma oh-so-gleefully picks.
Kris disappears into and inhabits the on-screen universe she fell in love with as a child, embodying all-too-literally the scream queen she always longed to be, while all those who doubted her get brutally skewered by a spear-wielding maniac. She then rides into the sunset with her hero, a neophyte willingly subsumed into the world of the old, much like Miasma itself. It all feels a little too cheap and easy and on-the-nose in the end, a dearth of ideas disguising itself as a statement about dearth of ideas. Much like Kris at the start of the movie, Miasma is blinkered by its own cold, analytical detachment; a shame, when one considers the gem Schoenbrun could have made had they crafted their keen insights into something perhaps more heartfelt.