Supplementary Notes on Camp
Meg and I recently rewatched the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie in celebration of the film’s thirtieth anniversary. I knew it had been panned by critics and audiences when it came out, but having watched and enjoyed it a couple years ago, I was surprised to find that it’s still loathed today by critics and audiences alike. As of this writing, it holds a 36% tomatometer score and a 43% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Now, you might be thinking—in fact, statistically, you probably are thinking—something like, “Yeah, because it’s a terrible movie, a failed first attempt at what would eventually be a really great TV show.” Much of the movie, though, actually works quite well, if you take it on its own terms. The snappy, witty dialogue and Buffy-speak is there in full force. Kristy Swanson’s Buffy starts out as more of a Valleygirl and ends up, in my never-humble opinion, as more of a Slayer than Sarah Michelle Gellar’s balanced version of the character, which, of course, went on to become the definitive Buffy. The definitive Buffy, at some point (probably around season 3), stops being campy. She grows up, puts away childish things, and starts taking saving the world from apocalypses seriously. She becomes nuanced, conflicted, and generally interesting. Swanson’s Buffy, on the other hand, is campy, exaggerated, over-the-top. I would even say I prefer her Slayer over the bubbly teen pining after a guy hundreds of years older than her that we get at the beginning of the show.
Kristy Swanson as Buffy in 1992’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox
When you accept and appreciate the silliness of Swanson’s Buffy, her vapid Valleygirl friends, their macho boyfriends, and their money-obsessed parents and teachers, a critique of post-Reagan American capitalism starts to show through. The hammy villainy of Rutger Hauer as Lothos, Paul Rubens as Amilyn, and David Arquette as Benny starts looking like a feminist's playful caricature of masculinity and the patriarchy.
In short, the Buffy film is a lot of fun, and a lot smarter, than the ratings suggest. If you're in search of a rich, thoughtful, and appreciative look at the film, you won’t find it here (at least not very much of it). I’m after something else. Soraya Roberts wrote a great Buffy retrospective in the Atlantic for its thirtieth anniversary though, so you can find more praise for the movie there.
For my part, I'll just say that I love movies like 1992’s Buffy, stuff that others often scoff and laugh and sneer at. I don’t mean I like Buffy because “it’s so bad it’s good”—although I can appreciate that aesthetic too—I mean I genuinely, unironically believe it, in all its campy indulgence, to be a good movie. I think the same way about many other scoffable, laughable, sneerable horror—that is, campy—films too.
First printed in the Partisan Review in 1966, Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp” doesn’t really define “Camp” (with a capital C, because why not?). Instead, Sontag gives us a list of numbered notes that draw an outline of Camp, which she thinks of as a “sensibility – unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it.”
Some of her notes are a little dated, and some, given modern sensibilities about class, gender, and sexuality, are uncomfortable (though not bigotted). Discomfort aside though, Sontag herself says Camp, as a sensibility, changes over time. What’s more, Sontag doesn’t address Camp in horror cinema at all, save for a couple of oblique mentions toward the end. Well, it’s been almost sixty years since its original publication, and we write horror articles, so here are some supplementary notes on “Notes on Camp.”
Sontag wrote hers for Oscar Wilde. These notes are for Christopher Lee.
Christopher Lee as Dracula, in the Hammer Horror classic film.
Image Credit: Rank Film Distributors (UK), Universal-International (International)
“I didn't want to be known as a man who only made horror films. I made some - very few.”
1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of degree of artifice, of stylization.
The least campy version of a thing is entirely unembellished, unremarkable, basic, boring, uninteresting, drole, drab.
The most campy version of a thing is big, over-the-top, exciting, ambitious, and either unforgettably good or unforgettably bad.
Is Camp really so modern? Sontag later says “the origins of Camp taste are to be found” in late 17th and early 18th century art forms, but I’ve always found it hard to read older examples of horror and heroism like Beowulf and the Odyssey without being impressed by how highly stylized they are, how grandiose, how absurdly masculine. I admire the seriousness of them, but I just can't take them entirely seriously all the time.
2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.
Maybe this was once true, but I’m skeptical. In either case, it’s definitely not true anymore. Camp has been the sensibility of choice among punks since the ‘70s. It’s also, as Sontag later notes, a feature of many queer communities.
Of course, Camp finds its way into right wing movements too—modern American patriotism is basically the Campification of nationalist sentiment.
Propaganda is political messaging with Camp.
Cinema has always been a venue for propaganda.
5. Camp has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. … Sometimes whole art forms become saturated with Camp. …
Horror movies—specifically ‘70s and ‘80s slashers—might just be the first thought that comes to mind when most people hear the word “Camp.” It’s built into their DNA, going all the way back to the earliest horror films of the silent era. The costumes, props, special effects (especially before the rise of computer animation), and the over-the-top performances of horror legends from Bella Lugosi to Christopher Lee to Bruce Campbell, from Fay Wray to Jamie Lee to Samara Weaving—Camp is so ingrained in the genre that it can be difficult to find a horror movie or TV show that isn’t, to some extent, campy.
The idea that Camp necessarily emphasizes aesthetics “at the expense of content” begs to be updated. In the ‘90s, shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files redefined the possibilities of what television could do in terms of art and narrative. Less than a decade ago, Jordan Peele’s extremely campy Get Out (2017) was, and continues to be, heralded as one of the great artistic achievements in modern cinema.
“I am never going to stop playing the villain. … audiences apparently enjoy watching me, and who am I to say no?”
8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not. …
Horror is a vision of the world in terms of the grotesque, the unsettling, and the misfit. It is the love of things-being-as-they-should-not-be.
9. As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated, and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility.
This is one of Sontag’s more questionable takes in the essay, though I think I know what she means. There’s a definite love of Camp in many queer communities. If you’re raising your eyebrows right now, just go to a modern burlesque show. Better yet, go to a drag show. If you don’t want to do that, and you still don’t believe me… I don’t know. You might be repressed and should watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) immediately. Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter is about as distilled a vision of the Camp sensibility as I can imagine. It’s absolutely content-less, with its nonsense plot and absurdly exaggerated characters. The pleasure of Rocky Horror has nothing to do with meaning and everything to do with style, spectacle, and antici- … … … -pation.
16. [T]he Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.
No one knows what the hell Donnie Darko (2001) is about.
“Comedy is the most difficult thing to do. Easily the most difficult.”
18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is less satisfying.
Did people really used to use the word “camping” in this way? I just can’t imagine it.
Other distinctions to be made: Camp is often mixed up with two other sensibilities, irony and meta.
I don’t mean dramatic, comedic, and situational irony. I mean irony as a sensibility, a detachedness. Irony is a vision of the world in terms of things for what they really are “underneath it all.” There’s an insider/outsider quality to irony—those who get it, and those who don’t. Irony as a sensibility is the love of wit, of clever turns of phrase, and of the unexpected.
By “meta,” I mean another kind of sensibility, a vision of the world in terms of its self-awareness. Art that is meta is commenting directly on itself, acknowledging its own existence as an artificial creation, often breaking what in theatre is called the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience. Meta as a sensibility is the love of art commenting on art.
Meta is technically more of a prefix than a noun, in and of itself. You’d say Randy engages in metacommentary in Scream (1997), or you’d say You Might Be the Killer (2018) is metafictional. In popular use though, meta is something that a piece of media simply is. It’s a state of being in which a work of art is aware of itself as art.
19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.
Friday the 13th takes itself very seriously, but many scenes are bad to the point of being funny.
20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. … Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. … Successful Camp … even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.
In the decades since “Notes on Camp” was published, the world has very much decided that intending to be campy is fun and good. For example, Sam Raimy’s Evil Dead 2—almost universally regarded as a better version of his first attempt at Evil Dead (which itself was quite good)—indulges, very knowingly and comedically, the director’s every campy impulse to the fullest extent possible. Self-awareness and comic indulgence, far from being “harmful,” actually amplify the madness of Bruce Campbell’s performance as Ash. They make the film feel like a version of Evil Dead that’s more like the original than the original. A version that knows and loves what it is, and one that makes sure the audience does too.
“I’ve done a lot of films that have become iconic, not necessarily because of me.”
24. When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. …
The parts of the original Friday the 13th that work best are the parts that go hard. First and foremost, Betsy Palmer is magnetic as Pamela Vorhees, putting the last twenty minutes of the movie on a whole other tier from the rest. Add to that what would become the legendary special effects work of Tom Savini, and the iconically minimalist film score of Harry Manfredini, and you have an absolute masterwork of Camp. The naïve qualities of the film—the questionable decisions in production and directing, the laughable performances—feel endearing somehow, but they’d be plain bad if it weren’t for the intense and ambitious work behind Palmer’s performance, Savini’s effects, and Manfredini’s score.
The Hollywood machine, however, stripped most of the sequels of that kind of raw artistry, with two exceptions. Part II, of course, introduced a new and undeniable touchstone of campy horror, Jason Voorhees, who went on to define the franchise. The other exception, Part VI: Jason Lives, is self-aware, campy fun that indulges gleefully in its own silliness. Apart from those and some exceptional performances and scenes, though, the franchise is full of unambitious Hollywood crap—bad Camp.
A friend suggested another subset of Camp called “cynical Hollywood bullshit”—i.e. the other Friday the 13th movies, Freddy Vs. Jason, Alien Vs. Predator, and any franchise that spawns endless sequels. My friend doesn’t agree that these movies are bad Camp. He says you just have to find other ways to enjoy them.
Cynical Hollywood Bullshit is a vision of the world in terms of unbridled fandom, love of the thing in all its forms, even the most money-grubbing version of it. It is the love of cheap convention swag, of absurd crossovers and endless sequels.
30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. … Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don’t perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.
Let’s go back to the Buffy movie for a second. Fans often criticize this version of the Slayer and her friends as too vapid, but the moronic things they say sound very close to what Americans writ large were saying at the time. Buffy and her Valleygirl friends are not shy about looking down on “the poors” and openly mocking “a homeless.” And when asked what she wants to do when she’s older, Buffy says, "I'm going to be a buyer." They’re repulsively classist, and obsessed with the material.
One of the strange powers of Camp is its use as a tool of satire, its ability to trick audiences into thinking the joke is on the art, when in fact it’s on them—in this case, Americans. Buffy, her friends, and her hypercapitalist consumer parents are gross in ways that reek of the post-Reagan era when the movie was made.
32. Camp is the glorification of “character.” … What the Camp eye appreciates is the unity, the force of the person. …
The king of villainy in horror who would go on to become one of the most recognizable, respected, and beloved actors in filmmaking, Christopher Lee, embodied the self-serious hyperbole of the Camp aesthetic. Onscreen, he is a towering, baritone-voiced force of will. Always carefully composed, deft, smirking, and decisive, Lee brought an outsized gravitás to his roles, commanding attention and demanding respect, not just for his performances, but for the films themselves. And yet, those same films, and Lee’s characters, were often absurd.
After 1996’s Scream (earlier too, but especially after Scream), horror movies started openly naming and renaming and playing around with the tropes and archetypes they use. This is not Camp. It’s meta. What characters like Randy in Scream and Marty in The Cabin in the Woods (2011) are describing when they talk about horror tropes and archetypes is Camp, but what they’re actually doing is metacommentary: commenting on themselves as characters and on the narrative as a narrative.
33. What Camp taste responds to is “instant character” … a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing. …
When director Tom McLoughlin talked to producer Frank Mancuso Jr. about infusing gothic horror and making Jason Lives a comedy, the one rule was that he couldn’t make fun of Jason.
Mancuso (and McLoughlin) both understood, if you make fun of Jason, you cross the line from self-aware fun to sneering irony, breaking the power of Jason as the embodiment of the campy slasher villain.
“We don’t live in a particularly attractive world. I don’t really remember, except as a small boy, anything but a pretty grim world.”
35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds – in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it. …
36. But there are other creative sensibilities …. For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement …. art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. …
One time, back when I was an undergraduate, I wrote a whole essay about something I called “divine failure”—my idea that some works of literature are powerful not because they succeed at what they’re trying to do, but because they fail with such incredible grandeur.
39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp … and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp …. But there is never, never tragedy.
I won’t quote any of the divine failure essay here because, well, let’s just say my professors were saints to put up with such wankery. But in it, I write about searching texts for their “limits,” places where the language feels desperate to express something that it ultimately can’t because the subject is too painful or too terrifying or too far beyond human comprehension.
Part of what keeps me coming back to horror is that even the “bad” stuff, the pure, naïve Camp that takes itself seriously but can’t quite be taken seriously, works desperately to explore and understand subjects of pain, terror, and the incomprehensible. The body of horror was birthed from the union of Camp and tragedy.
