Horror & the Camp Sensibility
Campy, pastel suburbia in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands
I stumbled across a blog post I wrote for a now-defunct horror website several years ago, so I thought I would post it here.
One of the many rabbit holes I’ve gone down in my academic research is that of Camp Style, which shows up often in the horror genre—two great tastes that taste great together. But so many people only think of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” when the term is invoked; this post explores why Sontag’s framing of camp comes up short in regards to queer horror.
“It is through Art, and only Art, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” —Oscar Wilde
Like most highly-contested matters where the notion of “taste” is concerned, camp is a polarizing concept. The term was most widely popularized by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” although she avoids positing a precise definition, instead talking around what she suggests is camp’s ineffable essence and offering qualities and examples of the way it manifests. For Sontag, camp is a sensibility that informs style; “the essence of Camp,” she writes, “is its love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration.”
On this affinity for extravagance, most critics agree, but Sontag’s characterization of camp is as “a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgement.” She also views camp as inherently apolitical, because, she argues, to emphasize style is to sacrifice, or at least deprioritize, content—essentially, for Sontag, form displaces function. Toward the end of the essay, she finally addresses camp’s association with homosexuality: “while it’s not true that camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap.”
These are the three tenets with which queer scholars generally take umbrage. Most crucially, it’s her dismissal of the inextricable link between queer and camp that rankles. After all, it’s a mode that originated within 18th and 19th century homosexual communities and was perhaps most publicly embodied by Oscar Wilde; Sontag’s elision of the queer origins of camp excises the intensely political power of it, and led to the dilution and dismissal of camp as a means of social critique. Camp, in its truest origins, has always been a critique—a mode that parodies dominant culture from a marginalized, queer position.
The aspects of camp that bind it with queerness—exaggeration, preoccupation with performance, and a focus on marginalized subjectivity—are the same qualities that make camp and horror such fruitful bedfellows. The horror genre is similarly structured by transgression and subversion, and like camp, it often centers Otherness. When horror and camp combine, queer possibilities erupt within the text. As we look at horror shows like American Horror Story, Hannibal, True Blood, The Order, What We Do in the Shadows, Scream Queens, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, we can see a wide spectrum of queerness that functions as both cultural critique and a site of pleasure—and is far from apolitical.
