When “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” director Jane Schoenbrun described their vision for the bloody one-take sequence in which Little Death (Jack Haven) massacres an entire summer camp — all set to Counting Crows’ 1996 rock ballad “A Long December” — they said it should feel like a Michael Bay movie.
“That’s the one part of the movie where it doesn’t have a filthy old print look to it,” cinematographer Eric Yue tells Variety. “It should feel cool and not in another era’s language, so we built upon that.”
In “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” a young queer filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder) travels to the cabin of a reclusive movie star (Gillian Anderson) in order to convince her to revitalize her career with a remake of “Camp Miasma,” which, in the world of the film, is its own “Friday the 13th”-style slasher franchise.
The bloody-as-hell sequence comes about halfway through the film, upending everything we’ve seen before. It features a series of hidden cuts and merges three locations together from the camp shoreline to the counselor’s lounge. Everything was carefully timed and choreographed to “A Long December,” including Little Death stabbing people every time the lyrics landed on the word “Hollywood.”
