This article contains spoilers for a whole bunch of silly movies.
Coralie Fargeat’s much-discussed new movie The Substance is many things—satire, allegory, a sincere inquiry into the burden of beauty standards on women’s mental health. But by the climax, when a giant blob of flesh with random boobs and rows of teeth tapes a picture of Demi Moore’s face over its approximate head and presents itself to the world to bask in adulation, The Substance is camp. The ensuing bloodbath takes what was already over the top into the stratosphere. Or, at least camp is how it’s playing according to the frequent reports from theaters of shrieks of laughter (or is that horror, or is that horrified laughter?).
The Substance is far from the only recent horror movie to provoke these sorts of squeals. Some of the most satisfying laughs at the multiplex this year have come, unexpectedly, from horror movies. Movies like The Substance, Longlegs, The Front Room, and (especially, gloriously) Trap are not horror comedies, per se, or at least they’re not presented as such. Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs was marketed as “the scariest film of the decade”—which made the sight of Nicolas Cage chewing the scenery underneath pounds of prosthetics and a stringy shoulder-length wig that much more amusing. Longlegs’ viral “Let Me in Now” song, delivered as if off the top of his pasty head, is less the stuff of nightmares than it is of memes. And if people know one thing about Lee Daniels’ demonic possession movie The Deliverance, it’s Glenn Close’s instantly immortal dialogue, “I can smell your nappy pussy.” If that movie were rolled out in theaters nationwide instead of heading nearly straight to Netflix, that howler of a line alone would have been worth the price of admission.
It’s in this way that these movies approach capital-C camp, in its original meaning, as Susan Sontag laid it down in her 1964 “Notes” on the subject. “The essence of Camp,” Sontag wrote, “is its love of the unnatural,” and to some degree, these movies all concern characters who are pretending to be something that they are not. They are stories of artifice and exaggeration that elicit Sontag’s “standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm”: “It’s too much,” “It’s too fantastic,” “It’s not to be believed.” All of these movies at some point appear to be completely out of control, and this is by design only occasionally. Excess alone isn’t enough to make something camp—if that were so, we’d all be gathering friends to watch Saw for the 90th time, as if it were Showgirls. It’s the unexpected or inappropriate-seeming excess, the surprise hilarity, that pushes these movies toward camp. Camp is really an act of discovery, an appreciation of something for not quite the reasons it apparently is supposed to be appreciated. At times, camp behaves like irony plus flamboyance.
Why is this happening now? The answer might lie less in the movies themselves than in their reception. This campy wave comes at a time when movies are seemingly more divisive than ever. For a while, film discourse felt like a choir preaching to itself. Something shifted recently—last year, virtually all of the awards contenders had loud defenders and detractors in both the critical establishment and chattier corners of social media. Choosing your own viewing adventure has never been more important in the age of Letterboxd clout. Camp requires, at minimum, a conversation with oneself to sort out what’s what and why, and that conversation is that much more enjoyable when others join in. Doubtlessly, some readers already have a bone to pick with my assertion that the movies named in this essay are camp (or campy or on the camp spectrum). These kinds of disagreements are a cornerstone of camp-spotting.
But this renaissance might also have something to do with the runaway success of 2023’s M3gan. That movie, about the perils of unrestricted screen time, talked out of both sides of its molded plastic face. Its horror and comedy, deriving from an A.I.-powered robo-doll, were held together by Allison Williams’ straight performance. That movie’s profile started building out via a trailer, months in advance of its release, that suggested viewers would have to see M3gan and her monkey-limbed sub-TikTok dancing in order to believe it. Riding on the edge of preposterous can be beneficial to a movie’s appeal, but it can also be tricky. Earlier this year, another movie built around a murderous little girl with killer dance movies, the vampire flick Abigail, tried to recreate the M3gan magic trick. (The movie was originally titled Dracula’s Daughter, until, following M3gan’s blockbuster box office, it was retitled, with the filmmakers even suggesting they were open to a crossover movie that would pit M3gan against the undead ballerina.) But Abigail’s marketing, and the movie itself, teetered over into comedy that was more transparently intentional, rather than letting the audience discover that comedy for itself, and despite having double the budget, it earned only a quarter the ticket sales.
Camp is in the eye of the beholder, and as acknowledged by Sontag and practically every moviegoing queer on social media, those beholders, traditionally, have been gay. In his 1977 essay “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” Jack Babuscio writes that gays’ acute awareness of the polarization within culture between the “normal” (hetero) and “abnormal” (homo) creates “a twin set of perspectives and general understandings about what the world is like and how to deal with it.” One such response, Babuscio argues, is camp. The Substance, Longlegs, The Front Room, and Trap are not gay movies in the usual sense: They are not about gay characters or gay issues. But they contain prominent elements that gay people (particularly gay men) have been historically drawn to: dueling divas, outsider antiheroes, sassy old women, and Josh Hartnett, especially when he’s playing a literal daddy. A climactic scene of Trap features a shirtless Hartnett photographed from all angles. It’s completely unnecessary and adds nothing to the movie but eye candy. It therefore feels like a very deliberate wink from writer-director M. Night Shyamalan toward a horny, man-loving part of his audience.
Ferreting out intent is a dicey prospect, though it’s a noble endeavor that is crucial to clocking what Sontag refers to as “pure camp.” She writes: “Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.” At minimum, ambiguity between what the filmmaker means to do and what is actually happening is essential. When reading Roger Ebert’s script for the 1970 Russ Meyer psychedelic soap opera Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, members of the movie’s cast wondered aloud if it was supposed to be funny—the director had them play it straight and the result is something that careens on and off the rails. Its ping-ponging between pointed satire and incompetence is its charm. Keeps you on your toes! Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is, appropriately enough for Vegas, resplendent in excess, but, inappropriately for dignified cinema, it’s too feral to know when to be embarrassed. It lets it all hang out, but one gets the sense that Verhoeven didn’t mean it to be quite so ridiculous as it is. What could ever aspire to the levels of absurdity and extreme human behavior that Showgirls achieves? Some of it had to be sheer luck.
Sam and Max Eggers’ The Front Room is a self-possessed movie about the horrors of living with an in-law. At its heart is Kathryn Hunter’s dynamite performance as Solange (a hilarious name for its ability to conjure a certain member of the Knowles family, and for no discernible purpose whatsoever). Solange is a widow who weaponizes her age to terrorize her step-grandson’s wife, Belinda (Brandy, who plays it so straight that her on-set stand-in might have been a wooden board). From under a Jerri Blank wig and in a thick Southern drawl, Solange is like Ruth Gordon on Galaxy Gas, in a movie that is a rip-off of Rosemary’s Baby, like, 20 percent of the time. The rest is a tour de force of bodily functions and calculated flailing for attention. Having just shit the bed (literally), Solange is carried off to get cleaned by Belinda’s husband Norman (Andrew Burnap). Behind his back, Solange glares straight at Belinda to let her know that this is all on purpose. Talk about looking camp right in the eye! Solange’s precise insidiousness isn’t at all apparent initially, and soon after meeting the character, the movie seems to tastelessly invite us to laugh at Solange’s geriatric struggling before understanding what she’s up to. When The Front Room is camp, it’s camping—Hunter is nothing but intentional here, and hers is one of the great comedic performances of the year (inside a … not great movie). But it all unfurls slowly so as to give the viewer the experience of discovery. And it is the picture of “not to be believed”: One pivotal scene finds Solange throwing a temper tantrum after Belinda confronts her racism. “Look at me! I am a racist baby! Goo-goo gaga! Dada, dada, mama, dada, mama!” wails Solange, tossing food around. Twitchy horror-movie strings sound, nonetheless, and the scene is punctuated by Solange crawling on the floor, pointing her butt at Belinda, and farting. With scenes like this, it’s a wonder more people didn’t talk about it. The reason is likely that almost no one saw it in the first place, though like many camp classics, it’s just dying to be rediscovered on home video.
Of all of this new batch, Trap is the purest camp. From start to finish, it’s a hoot. Hartnett’s stiff, stilted acting is a product of his needing to blend in as an average dad despite the fact that he is a serial killer. That is about the only intentionally synthetic element of this outrageous movie. Hilarity otherwise comes at the expense of Shyamalan’s attempts to weave a taut cat-and-mouse thriller. The plot is absurdly simplistic across the board—at the pop concert in which the first half of Trap takes place, a merch guy conveniently and unwittingly gives Hartnett’s Cooper (aka “the Butcher”) the download on the stakeout underway inside the venue (they’re looking for the Butcher!) and shows him parts of backstage that are off-limits to general concertgoers. Through a combination of dumb luck and homicidal will, Cooper gains access to the pop star Lady Raven, who somehow doesn’t have an entourage (or even a single hanger-on) and is ludicrously easy to corner, coerce, and spirit out of the building.
As with so many camp classics, the comedy is also enhanced by certain extratextual details. Raven is played by Shyamalan’s own daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, who is … about as convincing a pop star as her father. She performs approximately 5,000 songs in about 45 minutes and has the charisma of a fingernail clipping. Ariel Donoghue plays Cooper’s daughter, Riley, and her dorky dancing when she gets called up on stage as Lady Raven’s “Dreamer Girl” is a singular highlight. And then there’s screen veteran Hayley Mills as a loquacious FBI profiler who simply cannot stop narrating her every thought about the Butcher over walkie-talkies as both her fellow agents and the Butcher himself listen in. Mills, as some members of the audience may remember, starred in the original Parent Trap, and now she’s in a movie about trapping a parent called Trap. Get it? Her furrowed brow and theatrical frustration after just missing Cooper in location after location started to elicit howls at the showing that I saw opening weekend. Intentional or not, it’s the comedy of the year.
As a notion and sensibility, camp is old-fashioned—John Waters, whom many consider one of the poet laureates of camp, thinks that no one even says the word anymore. But few joys can match the one derived from going to see one thing and ending up with something uproariously different. Zoomers and millennials famously favor putting their money toward the “experience economy,” like traveling and concert-going, and discovering the pleasures of a movie that were unannounced or, ideally, that the movie itself seems unaware of, is time well spent in a theater. To W magazine, nightlife baroness Susanne Bartsch said: “Camp is an intellectual’s hanky code to other like-minded individuals.” What Nicole Kidman says of AMC Theatres in a beloved (and camp!) pre-movie promo is true of those united with an eye for camp: We make movies better.