hey, you!
Welcome back to my Little Death analysis series!
In this part, we’ll be talking about the camera work during Little Death’s killing spree, how it connects to the concept of “reality” in Camp Miasma, and what the idea of the “remake” gives us.
side note: I’m using Camp Miasma to refer to the actual movie and “camp miasma” (with quotation marks) to refer to the in-universe film franchise. hopefully that makes it easier to differentiate between the two while reading!
To talk about the significance of the camerawork during the spree scene, I’d like to start with the details of Little Death’s first kill.
In the beginning of the scene, Little Death walks out of the lake and approach one of the campers, who squints and tilts her head at them as she asks, “What are you?”
There are two points to this scene that I think are worth mentioning.
First, she doesn’t ask who Little Death is, despite Little Death clearly being a person (albeit a person in a weird costume). She uses the word what, implying a lack of personhood, suggesting that Little Death may not be entirely human. This is significant to Little Death’s character because their gender identity and expression in life already made them subject to dehumanization (and eventually murder) by the other characters. Remember that Little Death is a ghost in the first place because other campers drowned them because they could not tolerate the fact that Little Death oscillated between feminine and masculine gender expression. The question of what a person is also may not be unfamiliar to trans and gender non-conforming viewers who have had their identities doubted; who have been asked what they are. This wording betrays the social and political tendency to view transness as a negation of one’s humanity. If you don’t fit into your society’s idea of sex or gender, do you even deserve to be seen as human?
However, this moment also shows us that although inhuman and undead, Little Death is now free from the transphobia and oppression they likely did and/or would have experienced in life. Besides being an immortal killing machine, their new form effectively gives them an “out” from the confines of cisgender society. In Little Death’s plastic suit, their body is obscured, and their mask completely hides their face. They are truly androgynous. Rather than being human — and thus restrained by gender norms and the invasive, interpretive gaze of others — Little Death has become something empowered and unrestricted.
The second notable aspect of this scene is how the perspective shifts as Little Death approaches their first victim. The camera swings from the outside in, depositing us within Little Death’s perspective. We are looking through their eyes as they move in for the kill, and we are put into their shoes when their first victim scrutinizes their identity and narrows her eyes as she tries to discern what we are. Then, Little Death — and by proximity, the audience — decapitates the character, effectively preventing further judgment or scrutiny. Switching to a first-person perspective occurs a few times throughout this scene, and it is one of the main powerful visual choices that allow us to literally see things through Little Death’s perspective.
During these moments inside Little Death’s head, the shape of the film changes and our perspective gains a black border. On a literal level, this is because we are seeing the world as Little Death sees it, so our vision is limited by the structure of the air vent mask. However, it also makes Little Death’s point of view look like a retro movie, complete with a square aspect ratio and the border of a TV screen. I also have to point out here that the shape of Little Death’s helmet, while obviously being an air vent, brings to mind the clunky shape of an old CRT television set. The visual and narrative blend of fiction and reality is a consistent theme in Camp Miasma, so it makes sense that Little Death’s perspective and costume could be another nod to the appearance of older films and retro television.
Near the end of the film, Little Death becomes part of a narrative that completely blurs the line between fiction and reality, and this inspires a whole fleet of thematic questions regarding what is “real” in both media and life. Does the bigotry in what we watch shape our reality, or are movies just a reflection of the mindsets that already exist in our society? Or is it a two-way street where what we watch inspires us to create more media that supports or denies our previously held beliefs? And is misogynistic and/or transphobic violence fated to “always come back” (just like Little Death) because of how deeply ingrained it is in the films we watch and create?
This line of thinking — repetition, cycles of violence, etc. — is where the concept of remakes or reboots comes in.
If our reality is partially shaped by the media we experience, we might decide to revisit problematic storylines. We may determine that remakes give us an opportunity to create new representations of old tropes — like Schoenbrun has done here, with Little Death and the idea of the trans killer — to present the possibility of layered and empathetic storytelling, which will hopefully inspire a similarly empathetic set of societal beliefs.
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