There are few things the horror genre loves more than hurt people hurting people – especially at a summer camp. This is the foundation of classics like Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, which take a familiar adolescent space and turn it into a setting for violence. It also seems that 2026 is the year that young queer filmmakers put their own spin on camp horror, with Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Avalon Fast’s more economically titled Camp both hitting theaters this summer. And while I can’t speak for the former, the latter is a gentle, dreamlike exploration of trauma and healing that deserves a chance from even the most jaded of horror fans.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) has suffered more pain than most young adults should be forced to take on. When she was sixteen-years-old, Emily was behind the wheel when a child ran in front of her car. Now, as an adult, Emily mourns the death of her closest friend, who accidentally overdosed on cocaine after a local house party. Desperate to feel different than she does, Emily takes her father’s advice and signs up to be a counselor at a summer camp for traumatized children. If she can share her own healing process with kids like her, maybe everything she suffered won’t be in vain.
According to the website, the camp is religious in nature, and Emily is initially worried that she’ll be surrounded by religious zealots. But she is quickly paired with Rosie (Cherry Moore), the chainsmoking elder statesman of the counselors, and is soon introduced to Rosie’s tight-knit group of friends. If the group has a leader, it’s Clara (Alice Wordsworth), and Emily takes an instant shine to the young woman, lighting up when Clara suggests the two of them go for a walk together. After a few nights of wine and cheap drugs, Emily begins to feel a sense of true belonging for the first time in years.
The feeling is mutual. Clara and her friends soon make a special offer to Emily: join them in the attic of the bunkhouse for a special ceremony where the group manifests their heart’s greatest desires. For the returning counselors, the asks are simple, such as a wish for a long-anticipated sexual encounter with the camp’s lead counselor. But in a moment of earnestness, Emily bares her soul. She wants to feel good – no pain, no anxiety – for just a few moments after all her years of pain and self-loathing. They drink; stars fall in the background through the attic’s small window. And somewhere in the woods, something ancient responds to their prayers.
At first blush, Camp might feel like indie horror’s latest exercise in trauma, filled with characters who retreat to a place out of time, unable to move beyond the hurt that happened to them. But Fast’s film focuses less on trauma than on recovery. Emily has experienced terrible things – accidents that threaten to break both her mind and her heart – and her weeks at summer camp offer her a path towards self-acceptance and healing. Her new coven, despite their tenderness, nudges Emily down a different path, one that promises wholeness at a heavier cost.
Avalon explores the selfish path of recovery most fully in Emily’s relationship with Eden (Izza Jarvis), a young camper who holds back from the rest of the counselors. When joining the group for an initial swim, Eden experiences their first period; Emily does what she can and laments the lack of a family member to help guide Eden through this formative moment. Later, Emily dreams of Eden plunging into the lake’s blood-red waters as she stands on the shore and dissipationally smokes. Eden is one of several paths to recovery offered to Emily as a counselor and she struggles to marry what she thinks is right with what brings her heart peace.
But Camp is not a movie about harm – rather, it is a film about healing clean or healing broken. We’re invited into Emily's world through soft focus cinematography and Max Graham’s gentle score. She seems to drift through her days, skipping between campfire events and late night wanderings through heavy fog. Camp brims with bright lights and sound, but the woodland landscapes crafted by Fast and cinematographer Eily Sprungman are reminiscent of a sensory deprivation tank, with Emily floating gently between memories and the bad feelings that continue to haunt her.
And through it all, Grimmer’s face – guarded but hopeful – serves as the audience’s conduit to the cosmos. It’s hard to believe that Camp is Grimmer’s debut feature; for some actors, the shapelessness of the story would be too much to carry, but Grimmer’s hesitant embrace of her new friends gives the film the only real progression it needs. Whether you spent a weekend or a month as a camp counselor in your youth, everything in Fast’s movie feels eerily familiar, and what horror does exist is more dark fantasy than the grotesque. One suspects Camp will mean an awful lot to the young queer kids who form a connection with the film.
For the rest of us, Camp is still a tender inversion of genre tropes. At 111 minutes, Fast pushes the boundaries of their narrative – trusting their characters to carry forward the film’s simple plot, even when a few missed beats between Emily and the audience would have made this runtime unbearable. But Fast and Grimmer keep us enthralled in every scene, asking us to commit fully to the story of what comes after trauma. Fast may already be a rising star in the realm of queer cinema, but Camp feels like the film that might invite the rest of the world in, too. [4/5]
Camp is now playing at the Chattanooga Film Festival.
