Camp
Writer/Director: Avalon Fast
Cast: Zola Grimmer, Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, Ella Reece, Austyn Van De Kamp, Sophie Bawks-Smith, Izza Jarvis, Aidan Laudersmith
There's a reason summer camps have long been fodder for horror storytellers. There's the simple logistical isolation of camps, for one thing, but the thematic reasons for returning to cabins and canoes and dark woodlands offer something else. There's a sense of remove from the real world, of possibility. In a pop culture landscape that's always cast summer camp as a potentially life-changing experience, camp horror can offer that same feeling, with an added layer of haunting, violent catharsis.
These ideas were certainly on the mind of writer/director Avalon Fast when they conceived Camp, a psychological horror dreamscape full of magic, sisterhood, and the ability to shed repression and embrace one's true self. A festival favorite hitting Chattanooga this week on its way to a wider release later this month, it's an undeniable queer horror spellbinder, dripping with menace and sensual power, destined to be the latest cinematic heir to films like The Craft.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is struggling. With one deadly accident already on her record already, she ventures cautiously out into regular teenage life, only to be saddled with tragedy yet again. She feels cursed, stuck, unable to get close to anyone for fear that they'll get chewed up and spit out as well. When her father recommends she take a job counseling at a camp for troubled youth, it feels more like tempting fate than a welcome respite.
But Emily soon finds that there's something profound to be gained from her camp experience when she meets her fellow counselors, a quartet of young women with similarly dicey pasts who've found kinship in the woods together. Though camp director Dan (Ausyn Van de Kamp) is deeply into the facility's Christian roots, the counselors walk a different path, one of late-night confessions and drugs and, most importantly, rituals meant to concentrate their desires and will and send them out into the world. Here, guided by the girls, Emily feels she might finally be able to let her past go and be who she really is, even if haunting voices in the woods keep calling out to her from the past, reminding her what she left behind.
From the first haunting shot to the last, Camp is, before anything else, simply gorgeous to look at, a feast of inventive visuals and dreamy pacing that feels Lynchian in its determination to never pause to explain what we're seeing. Emily's story is straightforward on a narrative level, but on an emotional level it's much more meandering, doubling over on itself, at odds with itself, full of contradiction and mystery. It's supremely difficult to capture that kind of ambiguity and deliberate conflict in a visual language, but Fast and cinematographer Eily Sprungman pull it off. From angelic visions in the woods to secret meetings in candlelit attics, this is an indie horror dreamscape worth savoring.
And it only gets better when the performances, and the chemistry between these actors, melds with the visuals. Grimmer is remarkable as Emily, a young woman who's forced so much of her emotional baggage deep down into her core that she doesn't know where the bottom of her fear and rage and grief are anymore. Watching her slowly relax, unfolding like a delicate orchid as her new friends coax her authentic self free, is a joy, and her cast mates complement this performance perfectly. They all stand out, but Alice Wordsworth as fellow camp counselor Clara deserves a special mention. Together with Grimmer she forms a white-hot core of heart that keeps Camp pulsing with life even in its darker moments.
Those dark moments, ranging from genuine violence to moments of quiet, perplexing dread, are key to making Camp work, particularly in a film landscape when so many coming of age horror stories are content to stop at the water's edge of their characters' epiphanies. Yes, there is catharsis in simple revenge, and in finding a way to live your life well after tragedy, but the truth is often much thornier, more about give and take than simple resolution. Camp understands this, and Avalon Fast understands this, and this film's remarkable kinship of the monstrous and the magical understands this too. This is one of the best indie horror films I've seen in a while, and I'm eager to see its dark spell spread.
Camp is in select theaters June 26.
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