Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

My understanding is that Kris became infatuated, then obsessed, with Camp Miasma. The scene where Billy is losing her virginity, with Little Death present for the moment just before the kill, sank its jaws into Kris's brain in childhood and became a formative experience. Her life has been subliminally run by it ever since, and it is what leads her back to Billy. She then goes through a journey that ends with her experiencing what she once watched Billy experience. That is a reading, not an explanation. The film does not hand you a settled answer, and Schoenbrun has said so directly. Asked by TIME whether Billy and Kris were ever really dead, Schoenbrun answered: "They die, but it's not a permanent death. It's fictional in some way. It's in the land of metaphor, poetry." Schoenbrun framed it as a little death rather than a big one, the kind that lets both characters shed some shame. Anyone telling you there is one correct interpretation is filling in a blank the film left open on purpose.