Bring Back Camp
Before horror became a competition for who could be the most disturbing, early 2000s slashers gave audiences something else: style, personality and a little camp. What did we lose, and is it time to bring it back?
By Morgan Alten
Bring Back Camp
The blood is fake. The scream is dramatic. The soundtrack is aggressively 2000s. Someone is wearing an outfit they would never be caught dead in today.
And somehow, that makes it scarier.
There is something strangely comforting about the horror movies that raised a generation on VHS tapes, late-night cable and questionable DVD collections. Before horror became synonymous with elevated psychological thrillers and increasingly graphic violence, there was camp.
Camp is horror that knows exactly what it is. It is exaggerated, theatrical and sometimes completely ridiculous. It doesn’t always ask its audience to take it seriously. At times, the fun is in watching a teenage girl run through a dark hallway in platform boots while a killer with a suspiciously elaborate mask chases her.
Maybe that is why we keep going back.
Not necessarily because those movies were better. Not because the effects were more convincing. But because they felt like something.
Meet Ginger
Released in 2000, John Fawcett’s “Ginger Snaps” follows sisters Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald, two teenage outsiders whose fascination with death is interrupted when Ginger is attacked by a werewolf.
The result is bloody, strange and deeply Y2K.
It is also just flat-out weird. That is part of its charm.
The Fitzgerald sisters are not polished teenage heroines. They are angry, morbid and spellbound by everything their suburban world tells them not to be.
Ginger’s transformation works as more than a monster story. Her changing body becomes a metaphor for puberty, sexuality and the uncomfortable process of becoming an adult. The film manages to be grotesque and humorous while still taking its characters seriously.
But there is something else about “Ginger Snaps” that is harder to explain.
It has a deep-rooted feeling to it.
Watch it now, and you can practically smell the era. The dark bedrooms. The heavy eyeliner. The flannel. The soundtrack. The grainy look of the film. The kind of conventional setting where something horrible could happen behind a perfectly ordinary front door.
“Jennifer’s Body,” Karyn Kusama’s 2009 comedy-horror film, widely known by young adult viewers, has that same quality.
Neither movie feels like it was designed to become a perfectly refined piece of content. They feel like movies someone discovered at 2:00 a.m. and then made them their entire personality for the next three weeks.
That is nostalgia at its finest.
What Happened to Camp?
Camp never really died. It just got better lighting.
Take “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s horror-sci-fi film for example. The 2024 body horror film is graphic and completely revolting at times. It is also undeniably camp.
The difference is that “The Substance” feels like camp made for an audience that knows what they are watching. It is perfected, visually meticulous and deliberately outrageous. The body horror is extreme, but the excess is part of the joke.
That is different from the camp of the early 2000s.
Movies such as “Ginger Snaps” and “Jennifer’s Body” have a messier charm. Their camp is baked into the era itself. The clothes, music, makeup and production make them feel like artifacts from a particular moment.
You cannot recreate that feeling simply by putting someone in low-rise jeans and turning down the saturation.
Modern horror, though, can be beautifully made and genuinely terrifying. Films such as “Hereditary,” “Talk to Me” and “Longlegs” often focus on psychological discomfort rather than the playful feel associated with older slashers.
There is nothing wrong with that, but there is something to be said for a movie that knows when to wink at its audience.
Horror has also become more comfortable showing audiences exactly what they fear. Gore is more realistic; effects are more convincing. Streaming makes practically every horror movie available at any hour.
Now, a generation has grown to view things that others might have only encountered in a movie theater.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: What happens when nothing feels shocking anymore?
The Desensitized Generation
Here is where things get interesting.
Today's horror-watching generation has seen a lot.
We grew up with smartphones in our hands and an endless stream of images in front of us. Violence can appear between a makeup tutorial and a video of someone’s dog. True crime is entertainment. Graphic movie clips circulate before a film even reaches streaming. The internet has made the strange, disturbing and downright disgusting incredibly accessible.
So what happens to a generation that has already seen it all?
Think about the difference between being shocked and entertained. A movie can show someone being brutally dismembered and still leave you thinking, “OK, I’ve seen that before.”
Give us an absurd premise or a notable character that makes us want to dig through our closet for a pair of skinny jeans and two camie tops to layer, and suddenly we care.
That might be the secret behind camp.
It does not have to win by being the most horrifying thing you have ever seen, it just has to be memorable.
The Nostalgia Test
Ask someone why they love a horror movie, and the answer is rarely just about the movie. It is usually about where they were and when they watched it.
Maybe they saw “Scream” at a sleepover when they were too young or watched “Final Destination” with their older sibling without their parents’ permission. Maybe they discovered “Orphan” years after everyone else had and immediately wondered how a movie that good had been sitting there the entire time.
Movies become attached to memories.
That is why nostalgia can make an old horror movie feel creepier, wittier or simply better than it actually was. The movie is not the only thing we are watching; in a way, we are watching ourselves from a younger age.
For students entering adulthood, that feeling can be especially strange. We are old enough to remember when movies were rented. DVDs were still stacked beside the television and finding something weird to watch felt like an accomplishment.
But what about the generation growing up now?
Their introduction to horror looks a little different. Kids born into the 2010s have “Insidious” sequels, endless franchise installments and increasingly extreme horror waiting for them before they are old enough to understand why the movie is frightening. Instead of discovering an unusual, authentic film from the early 2000s, they are often being handed another version of the same story.
And somewhere between the remakes, reboots and sequels, something gets lost: the original weirdness.
We had movies that took bizarre ideas and made them their own. The next generation gets a horror franchise that has reached its seventh installment before they have even reached high school.
That may be why the early 2000s feel so special now. These movies were not necessarily bigger. They were a reflection of us.
The Scoop
So, Cleveland State University, what are we actually looking for in horror?
Maybe the answer is not that modern horror is worse, but that we miss the atmosphere.
We miss movies with their own charisma, before algorithms could tell us what to watch next. Or discovering something because a friend told us about it. It was found on a shelf or it happened to be playing on television at midnight.
It’s the feeling of not knowing what we’d get.
“Ginger Snaps” gives us a girl-chasing werewolf. “Jennifer’s Body” gives us a possessed teenage girl who eats boys. “The Substance” gives us feminine body horror to make the strongest stomach reconsider dinner.
All three are extravagant. You remember them, but only two smell like 2000.
Maybe that is what we are really yearning for.
Not the gore, killers or the scares.
The feeling.
Let horror be strange. Let it be messy. Let it be fun.
So this fall, turn off the lights. Put on the movie your peers have been telling you about. Let the opening credits roll.
If the villain walks through the door wearing a mask that looks like an actual human being spent hours sewing it by hand?
Perfect.
Give me a monster with a look. Give me a costume someone clearly spent time thinking about and obsessed over. A character that feels like it was made by somebody with a vision.
