Jack Haven’s Little Death Is the Bloody, Beating Heart of Camp Miasma

This essay contains spoilers for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.Jack Haven utters no words in the film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Their performance is still the most affecting of them all — at least for trans viewers like me who grew up being taught that the bodies we wanted were monstrous and other.Growing up as a closeted trans girl who also loved horror movies was, to put it bluntly, a mindfuck. I wanted nothing more than to somehow be a woman, and yet I inhaled media that seemed designed to make me feel like that wish was fundamentally wrong. Whether it was Norman Bates impersonating his dead mother in Psycho, Leatherface wearing an old lady mask, or Buffalo Bill crafting a skin suit made from women’s flesh, Hollywood was drilling a damning message into my heart: You’re evil, disgusting, and gross. What’s more, your only proper fate is death.There’s no denying the harm the trans killer trope has wrought. I am sure a non-zero number of people who fearmonger about trans women in restrooms and locker rooms were influenced in part by Psycho. I know it probably delayed my own coming out, given how many movies I consumed where people screamed and wailed at the very idea of a masculine body in feminine garb. But there’s also no denying the affinity many queer and trans people feel for this genre that has demonized us. At the very least, it’s a subset of movies that acknowledged the existence of cross-gender identification — even if only in caricature.Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature confronts the trans killer trope head-on. Protagonist Kris (Hannah Einbinder), the young queer filmmaker hired to reboot the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, addresses it directly through overly intellectual pontification about “depictions of monstrosity” and the transphobia laced throughout horror cinema. The Miasma films she has been hired to bring into the 21st century featured a trans killer, Little Death (Haven), an abused camper who might best be