We’re at a stage in the media landscape where I sometimes wonder if we should ever so slightly gatekeep the word camp, if only to preserve some sense of meaning. For the sake of this thought experiment, imagine camp in your head. Further imagine camp horror, specifically.
Because we do this thing where we’ll say something is “so bad, it’s good.” What we really mean, when you break it down, is that a piece of media is bad. It’s poorly constructed. But, for whatever reason, you personally find an endearing quality to it. It’s bad but you like it. Which is totally cool. But we tend to pair this with the word “camp.”
Now “camp” is already a very difficult thing to define, and in some capacity that’s the point.
It’s a constellation of sensibilities with strong ties to queer media and queer-inspired design but not necessarily defined by it. What we’ve done in the modern day is made this very strong synonymous connection that “camp” == “bad,” reducing it to a linguistic singularity that doesn’t encompass everything that camp is.
If we look at “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag (1964), we see her address this at the end.
- The ultimate Camp statesman: it’s good because it’s awful…Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I’ve tried to sketch in these notes.
And we have to point out, that she only makes this assessment after going through fifty-seven other description and discussion points.
What we’ve done is almost turned the term “camp” into a shield against critique.
“It’s camp, you wouldn’t get it.”
What we fail to understand is that camp can still be “good” by any given critical measure. And just because something is camp, doesn’t mean it’s immune to its own genre conventions or exceptions. Something can be camp and that’s completely independent of whether it’s good or bad at what it does.
And when we’re talking camp horror, we see how this etymological pathway starts to wend and wind. Because let’s say we look at some of these earlier notes on camp.
Sontag describes it as “the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not” giving the example of Art Noveau and floral lighting fixtures. She says camp has an element of the “strongly exaggerated.” You could very easily make the argument that this is an inherent quality of horror. Of things being “just off” from reality if you want to use a looser interpretation of the note. At the same time, Sontag pairs this with the epicene and the androgynous. This ideal is not only less common, but often antithetical to what large swaths of the horror genre does. It actively uses hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity as major thematic elements.
In the second note camp is described as “disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.” Sontag is implying a preference for aesthetics vs content, and this has very interesting implications for the horror-camp relationship. One could argue that horror is almost incapable of being truly apolitical because at it’s core it’s a reflection to the fears of its time. It can’t divorce itself from the cultural zeitgeist completely. Let’s say it could, however, get very very close.
At that point we imagine a horror movie that’s all artifice and no deeper content. What movie is that? Is it your average no-brain gorefest that actually gets closest to pure camp by that element of the definition? That’s probably not the first kind of movie you thought of when asked to imagine a camp horror movie, but it would absolutely abide by the “spirit of extravagance.”
So if we utilize the concept of “camp horror” to examine camp through a horror lens and horror through a camp lens, we’re left with a much more tenuous relationship. Are we actually applying the term camp properly? Does camp take on a new form when applied to horror compared to other genres? What’s the horror version of “a woman…in a dress made of three million feathers?” Can horror actually be camp? What does camp horror actually look like?
More importantly, does the language continue to serve us?
Pixels and Pins Studio 