Every week in the 1990s, Gillian Anderson would throw on a sensible, well-pressed pantsuit and face off against a parade of extraterrestrials and boogeymen. Being a famous woman of the Nineties, Anderson also found herself somewhat inevitably facing off against the era’s IRL boogeymen, such as Harvey Weinstein, the huffing, puffing uber-producer who shaped the film industry back then. He’d always want her to star in “scary things” for him, she once recalled, as if TV’s most prolific monster magnet would want nothing more than to replicate her day job on the big screen, too.
She’s famously bidialectal, due to her upbringing between London and Grand Rapids, Michigan, and today is on a video call from France – a neutral ground, maybe, but one she’s chosen to speak with an American accent in. Anyway, she remembers her interactions with Weinstein always involving “a kind of bribery” with an element of quid pro quo. Playing Billy Presley, a horror icon famed for a starring role in a B-movie film franchise, Anderson tells the prodigious young filmmaker (the actor and comedian Hannah Einbinder, of the acclaimed Hacks) hoping to work with her that she doesn’t scare easily – after all, Billy says, she auditioned for The Burning, a real-life Friday the 13th knock-off that served as Weinstein’s first producer credit.
Anderson’s casting in Camp Miasma is in tribute to writer and director Jane Schoenbrun’s early love of The X-Files. They always want a minority filmmaker to talk about how their life has been hard, and why they’re dysfunctional Plus there’s the sex of it all. Camp Miasma is about horror, but it’s also about orgasms.
The earliest thoughts of sexual longing felt by Kris, Einbinder’s character, came as she watched archetypal horror heroines flee from masked men – usually while dressed in their underwear, occasionally right before they were horribly butchered. It’s the kind of fantasy that would make Freud’s eye twitch, but also not trouble Anderson in the slightest. She’s about to publish her second collection of erotic fantasies, crowdsourced online.
One woman wrote to her about wanting to be tied down by her own dentist; another admitted she craves the sexual freedom that would be instigated by her husband’s demise. In Camp Miasma, it is Billy who grants Kris the freedom to voice, then indulge, those fantasies of hers. It’s as if Anderson took her brilliantly frank sex therapist from Netflix’s Sex Education, drenched her in blood, then sent her overseas to save the world’s libidos one person at a time.
Upon receiving the Camp Miasma script, Anderson began to see the parallels. Next to a glamorously coiffed Anderson is a groggy Einbinder, 31, who is valiantly persevering through a press junket despite being struck down with flu. Like Anderson, she saw herself in Camp Miasma.
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