Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Casts Vancouver Island as Its Final Girl

A reclusive actress living in the woods, an anonymous serial killer, and an aspiring filmmaker make the most of Vancouver's vistas.MUBIOn Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.The new movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a new spin on the summer camp slasher made classic by such films as Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp. Set in the present, the movie tells the story of Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young filmmaker who sets out to reboot an old slasher flick, Camp Miasma, haunted by a mysterious, helmeted killer named Little Death. While Kris has been asked to work on this remake, she has her own history with the Camp Miasma franchise, namely a long-time fascination with the reclusive actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson). Billy played the final girl in the original installment.The plot is set in motion when the two get in touch, and Billy invites Kris to visit her at her isolated Pacific Northwest abode. Billy isn’t just living in the woods either—she’s made her home on the summer camp where the first film was shot. The rustic setting, with looming peaks, snow-coated pines, and an all-around sense of abandoned creepiness, brings to mind David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and numerous slasher films that undoubtedly inspired this work.Hannah Einbinder stars in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma as Kris, an up-and-coming filmmaker who journeys to the Pacific Northwest in search of the reclusive star of the slasher franchise she is rebooting. MUBIGiven the complex world-building involved in developing lore and physical memorabilia for the Camp Miasma franchise as well as the matte-glass painting approach, production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland joined forces. “Sometimes when you take over a place, people can get a little cagey, especially if they hear the terms ‘horror movie’ or ‘slasher.’ But truth be told, everyone was so jazzed to see us transform these spaces,” Hyland explained. For a production that regularly involved gore and geysers of blood, the communities they worked with were game. Here Tonner-Connolly and Hyland discuss where Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was filmed and why they brought back the largely forgotten technique of matte glass painting for this project.Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the original star of the Camp Miasma series, lives on the original film set. MUBII want to begin by talking about where you all filmed. It is set in the Pacific Northwest, but where were you actually shooting?Brandon Tonner-Connolly: It was actually almost all on Vancouver Island. We had 25 shooting days, and 24 of them were on Vancouver Island. The last day we were back on the mainland at a stage to shoot the Flesh Palace, Little Death's lair underneath the lake. But other than that, it was all on Vancouver Island.And tell me about the scouting process—why Vancouver Island?Matt Hyland: We took a trip with the producers, Jane, the DP, Eric, and basically just hopped in a van and started driving up and down the coast of Vancouver. We took ferries. We were in very remote parts of the city. We were in distant mountains. The search did not go further than that. We visited at least a dozen summer camps that were closed at the time. Vancouver just had a really nice X factor to it—the tree line, the skyline, the mountains, the weather—all these things worked in a really nice harmony out there. And there’s this legacy too with The X Files and a number of horror movies being filmed out there, so it felt like a good place to add to the conversation of Vancouver in cinema slasher history.Billy and Kris wind up with something of a special connection, as seen here shopping for snacks in a market modeled off of upstate New York's beloved Stewart's stores. MUBIWas there an actual location where the camp was meant to be set?BTC: In the very beginning, we were talking vaguely about upstate New York as a home base. But then it became clear that upstate New York wasn't going to work for the filming logistics. We knew that we were going to have to shoot wintertime in the summer and things like that. But we did try to bring a little bit of those upstate elements into Vancouver. For example, in upstate New York there's a chain called Stewart's that’s a gas station and convenience store.I’m familiar with Stewart’s!BTC: And they have those signs outside that are always like, “Stewart's: best milk in the county!” I have a soft spot for those places, and [director] Jane [Schoenbrun] does also. So when we were shooting the gas station that pops up a couple of times in the movie, we have a banner outside that says: ”Best Milk in the Country.” But the gas station was up at a small town called Lake Cowichan. It has that mountain view in the background, which provided a really nice backdrop, especially for the closing shot. And gas stations are a wildly profitable business, it turns out, and it is so expensive to close them down.A campfire scene as filmed on Vancouver Island MUBIDid you all find a summer camp to film at or did you build the camp via sets?BTC: I think the hope was to find a summer camp that was one space we could use for the entire film. But there was really nothing on Vancouver Island that fit the bill. So we ended up piecing it together from two different camps, Camp Barnard and Camp Pringle. One was on the east side of the island and one was on the west side, and we utilized the buildings in each space and brought them together visually. We made sure that the signage at both places was the same and that the visual landscape matched up. This was partly logistical because it was the summer and we were shooting at a summer camp, so nobody had a large block of time that they wanted to lease to a movie—especially one that had gallons and gallons of fake blood pouring everywhere. And then we found a rec center that we used as the interior of our cinema. So it was a lot of piecing it together from all those different elements.MH: With an independent film, you have to be very judicious about what you build and why. So we got to sort of sculpt the world through set dressing and design. That sort of allowed for something that Jane incorporates a lot, a bending of reality that deliberately merges the past and the present, fiction and nonfiction.And the house that Billy lives in—where was that filmed?BTC: That was a really lengthy search for exactly the right place that had some of the built-in elements that we needed. It was the hardest location to find, but we ended up finding this one cabin that was tucked away by Lake Cowichan. It was a bit derelict inside, actually, and there were actual holes in the walls and floors. There were all sorts of little eccentricities, but it had the right layout, and it had kind of the right windows, and a lot of other elements that we knew that we wanted from the ground up. And the set decoration was such a huge part of it where we like to hide small things in there, like in the ice bucket by the bar, it's actually filled with Sour Patch Kids. And that’s because Billy is a character who loves candy and is full of secrets.The killer, Little Death, stalking the grounds of the summer camp. MUBIYou mentioned earlier that the only scenes filmed on the mainland were of Little Death’s lair. How was that fleshy underworld-like space created?BTC: We called Little Death’s lair by the lake the Flesh Palace. We built that on a sound stage in mainland Vancouver, which was fun.MH: And it was actually the same sound stage where they built Backrooms, so our liminal video store set became the Backrooms set a few weeks later, weirdly enough.BTC: We started with the concept art and had to lock in so many specific details about the texture and quality of the flesh walls. It’s one thing to just say “flesh walls,” but we started asking whether it should be actual meat, or more like bubblegum or an illustration of an intestine in a doctor’s office. Ultimately, we settled on the idea that it should feel like you are on a theme park ride. We went through dozens of revisions with our pink and purple color palette. It was a real marriage of building, painting, design, and special visual effects.Why Everyone Will Be Going to Osaka in 2025