Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes pains to deliver a slasher fan’s dream

Matte paintings—not CGI—warp a world designed to hit a nerve for slasher fans.

The short version

• Here’s one for all the kids who were exposed to lurid slasher movies when they were way too young and it kinda messed them up… but they’re finally ready to laugh about it.
• The movie follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer film director tasked with creating a “woke” reboot of a politically incorrect sleepaway camp franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th .
• So the designers essentially winged it, scouring old film books and blogs for any kind of direction.

What happened

To create the otherworldly shots, they painted ethereal backdrops on glass, leaving some parts of the canvas blank so the actors could be positioned to appear as if they were walking through them. The process was anxiety-inducing, the designers said, since they wouldn’t know whether it would work until the director lined up the glass with the camera lens and the actors moved through the empty spaces.

Why it matters

But the attention to detail paid off, allowing the designers to be much more playful with the scene art.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.