Slasher films – Blood and Porridge

October 28, 2026October 30, 2026

A splatter of life and death

© Plan B Entertainment / Mubi

Two days ago, on October 26^th, my wife and I received an early Halloween treat. The 37^th Singapore International Film Festival showed Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), the new meta-horror movie from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, at the Gallery Theatre in Singapore’s National Museum. We got tickets for the event before it sold out.

This is Schoenbrun’s third movie, following We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), which I haven’t seen, and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which I did see recently while it had a tenure on Singaporean Netflix. It took me two attempts to get into I Saw the TV Glow, but when I adjusted to its wavelength it really impressed me. It’s a haunting and melancholic film about a pair of alienated high school kids (Justice Smith and Jack Haven) and their relationship with a kids’ horror TV show that, ultimately, causes reality to blur into fantasy. When adulthood arrives and reality fails to blur anymore for one of them (Smith), the consequences are tragic. The film has phantasmagorical qualities that sometimes make it feel like a David Lynch movie – if, crucially, David Lynch had grown up in the 1990s rather than the l1950s and 1960s. And its ending is genuinely sad.

I certainly didn’t feel sad after watching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which I found a joyous and life-affirming, and very funny, experience. Crudely, it could be summarised as 1950’s Sunset Boulevard transplanted into the universe of the Friday the 13^th movies (1980-2009). A very Friday the 13^th-like horror franchise called Camp Miasma, wherein countless horny teenagers were bloodily slain by a killer called Little Death (I Saw the TV Glow’s Jack Haven with a box-shaped vent on their head and wielding a humungous spear), made pots of money in the 1980s. Now a studio wants to reboot the franchise but, alas, the movies are today regarded as problematic. The character of Little Death, dismissed at the time as a ‘freak’, is in modern parlance a transgender person.

To handle the project, and to cover their arses, the studio executives commission a young, queer director called Kris Wiliams (Hannah Einbinder), previously responsible for an arthouse film that was a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) told ‘from the perspective of the shower curtain’. They presume she’ll make it woke enough for modern sensibilities.

The earnest, nerdish but very likeable Kris has the idea of casting in her new version of Camp Miasma the actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who’d played the ‘final girl’ in the original movie of the series. Billy has become a recluse and bizarrely lives in the huddle of old summer-camp buildings where that movie was filmed four decades earlier. So, Kris goes to visit her and reality, as in I Saw the TV Glow, begins to blur…

Schoenbrun is obviously a big fan of the 1980s slasher movies that inspired the film. In the opening-credits sequence, there’s a montage of Camp Miasma merchandising and artefacts, including video cassettes of the first movie and its (increasingly shite) sequels. As with Friday the 13^th, the sequels include a third instalment filmed in 3D, one called The Final Chapter and a subsequent one called A New Beginning, one where Little Death goes into outer space (Miasma 3000), and one where he tangles with a monster from a rival franchise (Little Death vs Sleepy Man).

© Crystal Lake Entertainment / New Line Cinema

Details elsewhere in the film also indicate how knowledgeable Schoenbrun is about the slasher school of cinema. Billy mentions the unpleasantness of auditioning for the 1981’s The Burning (which was produced by a young Harvey Weinstein). Kris refers to a gutter-press rumour that once circulated about Jamie Lee Curtis, star of the Halloween (1978-2022) franchise. And Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela is alluded to – she appeared in the second and third entries in the Sleepaway Camp series in 1988 and 1989.

All this makes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma intriguing because Schoenbrun is transfeminine and non-binary and uses the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’. And notoriously, those old slasher movies that Schoenbrun is a fan of frequently used gender non-conformity and transgender identity as cheap ways to explain their killers being murderously loopy. See the first Sleepaway Camp movie in 1983, or Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) – which, despite its dodgy gender politics, is in my opinion the best slasher movie of the 1980s – or of course, the granddaddy of them all, Psycho.

I started watching the film wondering what it would do with those weary and mean-spirited old tropes. As it turned out, Schoenbrun not only dismantles them but reassembles them and makes something wonderfully fresh out of them. In the process, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma reclaims the slasher sub-genre for an audience that in the past was too often demonised by it.

One particular joy of the film is its performances. Hannah Einbinder makes an engaging central character, clearly a stand-in for Schoenbrun, and sells the idea of somebody fascinated by the slasher sub-genre while simultaneously troubled by its misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. But the film belongs to Gillian Anderson, whose portrayal of Billy Presley is majestic. I’ve read that as a teenager Schoenbrun was a big fan of The X-files (1993-2002, 2016-18), where Anderson found fame playing FBI agent Dana Scully. So, getting her to perform in their movie must feel like a dream come true.

Incidentally, another unwelcome trope in cinema is that of a sad, mad and possibly dangerous female movie star living as a recluse, past her prime and losing her looks. It’s sexist – though if nothing else, it highlights the sexism of the industry around it. Gloria Swanson, who played the washed-out actress Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, was only 50 when the film was made; whereas nobody questioned the right of her co-star William Holden to still be a leading man in 1969’s The Wild Bunch when he was in his fifties. But there’s none of that pathetic-ness about Anderson’s character. Yes, she’s a bit odd at times; but she’s also bold, funny, charismatic, sensual and empathetic. Generally, she’s a joy every time she’s on screen.

Elsewhere in the cast, my wife was delighted to spot Kevin McDonald playing a clerk at a hotel near Billy’s summer-camp abode – McDonald is a member of the Canadian comedy team The Kids in the Hall, whose 1988-95 TV sketch show she’s a big fan of. Another welcome face is that of Patrick Fischler, playing a scary gas-station attendant. Fischler made a small but devastating appearance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) as the nightmare-haunted man who decides to check out what’s really behind the diner he keeps dreaming about and triggers the most frightening moment in the film – actually, for my money, it’s the most frightening moment in Lynch’s career.

© Sante Fe Productions / New World Pictures

I’ll admit, though, to having a few misgivings when I sat down to watch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma because I’m definitely not a fan of 1980s slasher movies. I’d already become a horror fan by the end of the 1970s and, for me, the 1970s were the golden age of the genre. During that decade, you got such classics as The Devils (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Exorcist (1973), Deliverance (1974), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Carrie (1976), Jaws (1976), Suspiria (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Alien (1979). So I was less than enthused when the 1980s arrived and all-of-a-sudden most horror filmmakers seemed interested only in making films wherein dummkopf teenagers get slaughtered by figures in Halloween masks and hockey masks.

For me, the biggest crime of 1980s slashers like He Knows You’re Alone (1980) or Prom Night (1980) or Happy Birthday to Me (1981) or The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was their stultifying lack of imagination. Any display of imagination in the slasher sub-genre seemed to begin and end in the film that kickstarted it, John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) – itself a 1970s movie.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma contains a number of scenes taken from the ‘original’ Camp Miasma movies of the 1980s. Some are stylised re-imaginings of them that are operatic in their gusto and feature extraordinary geysers of blood. But other scenes are meant to be ‘authentic’ ones, which Schoenbrun stages with a convincing, desperate, no-budget 1980s tackiness. I did end up thinking that if I’d been a few years younger at the time, and less in thrall to 1970s horror movies, and the 1980s slashers had seemed like ‘forbidden fruit’ to me – films I was officially too young to watch and I only occasionally saw, furtively, through my fingers, on scratchy VCR recordings – I might have developed an affection for them too. And today I’d enjoy them at least in a so-bad-they’re-good way. (The reality is that I find them so bad they’re annoying.)

Incidentally, I was delighted that Schoenbrun included in their film a reference to 1983’s Videodrome, a horror movie far better than its slasher contemporaries, made by a genuinely visionary filmmaker, David Cronenberg. As an actor, Cronenberg was game enough to appear in Jason X (2000), the entry in the Friday the 13^th franchise where, yes, Jason Voorhees goes into outer space.

Lastly, it was a pleasure to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at the Singapore International Festival, surrounded by an enthusiastic and appreciative audience. Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy the film and gave it a much-deserved round of applause at the end.

© Compass International Pictures / Aquarius Releasing

September 26, 2026October 26, 2026

The Herschell house of horror

From wikipedia.org / © Super Festivals

Halloween is just over a month away. Here’s a first, horror-themed post to mark the beginning of the ‘witching season’.

I didn’t particularly care for the films of American director and producer Herschell Gordon Lewis, who was nicknamed ‘the Godfather of Gore’ and who passed away ten years ago today, on September 26^th, 2016. That said, I certainly liked the idea of Lewis.

Lewis’s exploitation movies spanned a variety of genres – softcore erotica (usually set in nudist colonies and including the likes of 1963’s Goldilocks and the Three Bares), comedies, children’s movies and at least one feminist biker flick, 1968’s splendidly titled She-Devils on Wheels. However, it’s for his horror films that he’ll be remembered, and for the simple but at the time innovative approach that he brought to the horror-film genre. He made the first horror movies that were truly horrible, i.e., loaded with bloodletting, dismemberment, disembowelment, scalping, eye-gouging, tongue-ripping and so on: Blood Feast (1963), 2000 Maniacs (1964), Colour Me Blood Red (1965), Taste of Blood (1967), The Gruesome Twosome (1967), The Wizard of Gore (1970) and The Gore Gore Girls (1972).

Not unexpectedly, Lewis’s approach did not go down well with mainstream movie critics – “Thoroughly revolting Z-grade garbage” was a typical assessment of Blood Feast – and was hardly the stuff that mainstream movie audiences flocked to. But his horror movies still packed enough folk into America’s drive-ins for them to turn a tidy profit and, over the years, he found a number of admirers among left-field film fans, filmmakers and commentators. More on those later.

Needless to say, his work didn’t make its way to the United Kingdom anytime soon. I remember reading about Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs in film books and magazines when I was a kid and thinking, “Wow, these must be the most hideous and terrifying films ever made!” But at the same time I knew the chances of me seeing them in censorious Britain were non-existent. The chances became less than non-existent during the 1980s when British politicians, tabloid newspapers and moral campaigners worked themselves into a lather over the ‘video nasties’ scare.

In fact, it wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that I finally laid eyes on some footage from his movies. This was courtesy of Jonathan Ross’s offbeat TV series The Incredibly Strange Film Show (1988-89), which devoted a whole episode to Lewis.

How different it is nowadays. A while back I saw some of his movies as double-bills on Britain’s now-defunct Horror Channel, which was available for all to watch on Freeview. Quite a few of them are up on the Internet, on sites like YouTube and Dailymotion. And with modern films featuring high-tech animatronic and computer-generated effects, Lewis’s movie gore – basically all the offal he could find at the local butcher’s shop and lots of bright red paint – looks so primitive it almost has a retro charm.

From wikipedia.org / © Box Office Spectaculars

Blood Feast was the film that made Lewis’s name and it remains his most famous, or infamous, effort. I have to say it’s a very bad film. The acting is atrocious, the budget is visibly tiny and the general level of professionalism is not much higher than Ed Wood standards. And yet… It might be one of the worst films I’ve seen, but I’ve never been able to forget it. Somehow, it still creeps me out. Maybe it’s the stark, single-minded way it goes about its bloody business – something reinforced by the score, a slow, thudding, doom-laden thing that’s little more than a funereal drumbeat. It’s so minimalist it makes the sparse, pulsing synth scores that John Carpenter did for his movies sound like Vivaldi.

Among the rest of Lewis’s oeuvre, I’ll admit to liking (a little bit) 2000 Maniacs, possibly because it’s an insolent remake of Brigadoon, the cheesy 1954 MGM musical about a phantom Scottish Highland village that appears out of the mist for one day every century. But while the village in Brigadoon appears so that Gene Kelly and Van Johnson can perform song-and-dance numbers there like The Heather on the Hill and I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean, the phantom village in 2000 Maniacs has a darker purpose.

It’s a southern USA village whose inhabitants were slaughtered by northern forces during the Civil War and now, as ghosts, they reappear every so often to take bloody revenge on any hapless Yankee travellers who come their way. As a commentary on the horrors of the Civil War, it’s hardly in the class of, say, the fiction of Ambrose Bierce; but in its crude, tacky manner it’s effective.

The only other 1960s film by Lewis I’ve seen is his third ‘gore’ film, Colour Me Blood Red, which is about an unsuccessful and embittered painter (Gordon Oas-Helm) whose paintings lack a certain something… A certain colour… A certain shade of a colour… Well, the title tells what the missing shade is and, as soon as he realises that, he’s secretly murdering people and applying their blood to his canvases. Hey presto! The local, snobby art critic (William Harris) immediately switches from slagging off his work to proclaiming him a genius.

While Lewis’s previous two horror films at least did things with a gory elan, Colour Me Blood Red is a dreary, uneventful thing. Particularly duff is a sequence where the artist terrorises two victims who are out at sea in a pedal-boat – an action set-piece involving a pedal-boat is about as exciting as it sounds. Also, among the friends whom the film’s young heroine (Candi Conder) hangs out with are a beatnik couple who insist on talking in a super-annoying type of rhyming hipster / jive-speak. At one point they manage to rhyme ‘daddy-o’ with ‘patio’. I spent the film waiting for them to die horribly. But damn it, they didn’t.

Meanwhile, I have to confess to liking, again a little bit, 1970’s The Wizard of Gore, which is about a stage magician (Ray Sager) who uses power tools to perform mind-bogglingly gruesome tricks on volunteers from the audience. When the tricks are over, the volunteers seem to be alive, well and in one piece. But later, after the show, they ‘revert’ to the grisly state they were in onstage and, obviously, die. Again, it’s cheap and ineptly made, but the film has a weirdness that’s difficult to forget.

The Wizard of Gore also won Lewis one of his very few acknowledgements from mainstream cinema. In 2007’s acclaimed comedy-drama Juno, Jason Bateman’s music / comic-book / movie nerd convinces Ellen (now Elliot) Page’s Juno that The Wizard of Gore is a better horror movie than Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). I have to say that if they honestly believe Lewis’s schlocky little opus to be superior to Argento’s demented masterpiece, Bateman and Page must be really thick.

I’ve also watched Lewis’s last movie from this era, The Gore Gore Girls, which is problematic even by its director’s usual standards. It’s a horror comedy, of sorts, wherein an arrogant, dandified – he brandishes a walking cane – private investigator (Frank Kress) and a liberated lady reporter (Nancy Farrell) investigate a series of murders where the victims are strippers and the suspects include a traumatised Vietnam War vet and a bunch of radical feminists who protest against striptease acts with placards saying things like ‘Quit with Tit!’ Finally, the investigator gets the supposedly liberated reporter drunk and goads her into participating in an amateur striptease competition with a 1000-dollar prize. She wins the competition, which means she’s now potentially the killer’s next victim. But the crafty investigator uses her as bait in a trap for that killer.

The Gore Gore Girls is unpleasantly misogynistic and voyeuristic and it handles themes like feminism and post-traumatic stress disorder with as much finesse as you’d expect, i.e., none. But for me its biggest problem is Kress’s investigator, whom Lewis evidently intends to come across as an eccentric, opinionated but lovable rogue. He actually comes across as a complete dickhead.

After a long hiatus from filmmaking, Lewis returned to it in his later years. This was after his great influence on the horror-movie genre had been recognised – generally in, say, the slasher movies of the 1980s where the emphasis was on bloody and outrageous ‘kills’ rather than on plot or characterisation, and specifically in the works of certain filmmakers who’d drawn inspiration from him, like Eli Roth, John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. In 2002 he directed a belated sequel to Blood Feast, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, which featured Waters in a cameo, and in 2009 a standalone horror film called The Uh-Oh! Show.

Meanwhile, without Lewis as director, 2000 Maniacs was remade in 2005 as 2001 Maniacs (which Eli Roth co-produced), and that remake received a sequel in 2010 entitled 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. The Wizard of Gore was remade in 2007 and Blood Feast in 2016, the latter with Lewis in a supporting role as ‘Professor Lou Herschell’, which must have been one of the last things he ever did. These films contained an element never seen before in Lewis-related movies: some decent actors. Their casts included such accomplished performers as Robert Englund, Bill Mosely, Crispin Glover, Brad Dourif and Jeffrey Combs.

A decade after his death, Lewis’s influence lives on. I recently watched Curry Barker’s acclaimed horror movie Obsession (2025). The sequence in it that’s most horrible – or depending on your point of view, most hilariously over the top – immediately put me in mind of The Gore Gore Girls.

What I love about Lewis, though, is that in the early 1970s he packed in filmmaking and turned to something very different – advertising. He became a guru on the subject and made a fortune writing books about it, such as 1974’s The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion and 1977’s How to Handle your own Public Relations. His speciality was direct marketing, the practice of bombarding large numbers of people with word of your product – which, while pissing off the vast majority of them, should hook a sufficient minority of them to make the exercise worthwhile. In a way, that’s what Lewis did with his horror movies.

In the end, Lewis became a very wealthy man – an exemplar of the American Dream. The fact that he achieved that dream on the back of direct marketing and excessive bloodletting seems odd but, also, appropriately American.