Dabbling with witchcraft is a time-honored tradition for troubled teen girls, especially in horror movies. Writer-director Avalon Fast adds their own dreamy spin on the subgenre with her sophomore feature, CAMP, an achingly melancholy coming-of-age film that will strike a nerve for anyone who was once a girl lost in the dense and tangled forest of adolescence.
CAMP Avoids Vilifying Its Teen Witches at Every Turn
CAMP stars newcomer Zola Grimmer as Emily, a young woman struggling to process the joint tragedies of a fatal traffic accident and the overdose death of a friend. Depressed and alone, she follows her father’s suggestion and takes a job as a counsellor at a summer camp deep in the woods. It turns out to be a Christian camp, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the counselors, who love nothing more than drinking, smoking, and partying all night. Embraced by the other girls (Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, and Sophie Bawks-Smith), Emily finds herself drawn into a world of feminine power and magic—but soon discovers that, like all things in life, it comes at a cost.
In previous incarnations of teen witch horror, it was generally accepted that the ringleader would crash and burn in the climax while her disciples returned to the humbling confines of a normal life. Think Nancy Downs strapped, screaming, to a bed in a hospital ward, her powers bound, reduced to a harmless madwoman. CAMP firmly rejects this framing. Emily is never afraid of her fellow misfits, entering into the world of witchcraft with open eyes and a wounded yet curious heart. “Fall from grace,” one of the girls whispers. “Into what?” Emily asks. “All of this,” comes the response, reopening a door to a world of friendship that Emily had previously considered shut.
The Characters in CAMP Inhabit a Hazy, Liminal Space, Ripe With Magic and Beauty
The world that Fast conjures around these girls unfurls like a dream, impossibly lovely and faintly unreal. CAMP feels like a hazy summer night that never ends, a memory slightly blurred by sweet wine, one where the finer details are lost to time but the sight of the fog on the lake, the light filtering through the trees, the shooting stars pouring from the heavens sticks with you forever.
It’s a space where trauma can be shared, processed, and released into the forgiving wind, and where lifelong friendships can be forged—or, just as easily, the kind of friendships that burn bright and fierce for a summer, then drift naturally apart, but still shape you. The relationships between the counselors feel real and lived in, rich with laughter, yet brimming with the complex, writhing anxieties of girlhood. These girls can be dangerous, perhaps even cruel, but Fast allows us to observe their rituals without passing judgment. This is all part of the process of growing up, as painfully necessary as a bone healing after a bad break.
Let CAMP’s Slow Burn Seduce You, and Succumb
CAMP’s unhurried pacing won’t appeal to all viewers, but if you allow yourself to sink into its witchy waters, it will welcome you into its warm embrace. Fast has created the rare teen witch film that focuses on grief as much as it does empowerment, creating space for her characters to pour out their pain and inviting the viewer to ache with them. It’s heartfelt, honest, and at times devastatingly beautiful—a film that’s sure to find the right audience with time, and a sign of great things to come from its director.