Girl Horror Grows Up: Avalon Fast’s “CAMP” Is Streaming Now

Avalon Fast shot her first feature on Cortes Island in the summer of 2019, when she was a teenager, with a group of friends and essentially no money. Honeycomb went on to Slamdance and became a genuine underground cult item, the kind of film that gets passed hand to hand by people who feel like they found it themselves.

She is twenty-six now. Her sophomore feature, CAMP, took Best Feature in the Next Wave competition at Fantastic Fest, collected prizes at Brooklyn Horror and Sicilia Queer, earned a Certified Fresh rating, and is currently available on demand through Dark Sky Films, with theatrical dates continuing into August. It is one of the more distinctive genre films of the year, and it is barely a horror movie at all.

She Named the Genre Herself

Fast calls her work girl horror. She coined the term around Honeycomb, by her own account half as a joke and half as a flag planted in the ground, and it has followed her ever since. The definition is loose on purpose: the eerie horrors of growing up female, haunted influence, groups of girls in the woods doing things that are equal parts magic and violence.

What is refreshing is that she does not seem entirely sold on the label, or on the horror designation generally. She has said outright that CAMP is fantasy, that it is genre, and that whether it qualifies as horror is an open question she is curious to see the world answer. Watching a filmmaker publicly think out loud about the box she has been placed in is more interesting than most marketing campaigns.

The Setup, and the Swerve

Emily, played by newcomer Zola Grimmer in her screen debut, is a young woman carrying the weight of having been the root cause of two accidental tragedies. At her father’s suggestion, she takes a counselor job at a Christian summer camp for troubled youth, the idea being that service might ease the guilt.

The first swerve is that the staff turns out to be considerably more interested in drinking and partying than in Bible study. The second is that these women, played by Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, and Ella Reece, welcome Emily completely, offering the acceptance and forgiveness she has not been able to give herself. The third is that they are a coven, and the peace they offer may come with terms.

Then Emily starts hearing a voice from the woods telling her to go home.

It Refuses the Grief-Movie Ending

Here is what makes CAMP genuinely unusual, and it is a structural choice rather than a plot twist.

Films about grief almost always follow the same arc. The character falls apart, hits bottom, and then gets up, gets sober, makes the bed, and carries bravely on. CAMP declines that entirely. As Katie Rife put it in her review, Fast has built a counter-narrative in which things might turn out fine even if you stay chaotic and keep getting high, or might not, and in which nothing you do particularly changes the outcome. There is something oddly liberating in that.

The film also flatly rejects Christian frameworks of sin and repentance, which is a pointed choice given that it is set at a Christian camp. Its moral universe is agnostic, and its witches are not benevolent nature spirits. They will hurt people. The film never tells you whether the women saving Emily are safe to be saved by, and it has no interest in resolving that for your comfort.

If you need a body count, clean morality, and a tidy third-act explanation, this will drive you up a wall. That ambiguity is precisely what the festival circuit kept rewarding.

The Look and the Company It Keeps

Eily Sprungman’s cinematography has drawn as much praise as the script, winning at Brooklyn Horror alongside the screenplay, and it is augmented in places by animated vistas that push the film further toward fable. Max Robin’s score does the hypnotic heavy lifting. The comparisons flying around are flattering and mostly apt: The Craft by way of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Virgin Suicides-era Sofia Coppola relocated from a Manhattan penthouse to the British Columbia woods, and, per David Ehrlich, a midpoint between Panos Cosmatos and Jane Schoenbrun.

That last name matters, because Schoenbrun is not just a comparison here. They publicly called CAMP an early-career masterwork, and Fast appears in their new film. This is a genuine scene rather than a coincidence.

A Whole Movement, Actually

Track the connections and a picture emerges. Fast starred in Louise Weard’s Castration Movie anthology and in Alice Maio Mackay’s The Serpent’s Skin, and turns up in Schoenbrun’s Cannes entry. Vera Drew of The People’s Joker championed Honeycomb. These filmmakers act in each other’s movies, blurb each other’s work, and are collectively building a body of DIY queer genre cinema outside any studio’s permission.

The point was made explicit at Fantasia this past weekend, where Schoenbrun, Weard, Mackay, and Fast all sat on a panel together to talk about exactly that overlap of friendship and creative practice.

We have written before about the labels and archivists who keep queer cinema from disappearing, which is essential work. What is happening here is the other half of the equation: a generation making the new stuff, cheaply and on their own terms, faster than anyone can categorize it. CAMP also lands in a busy year for witch films, alongside The Serpent’s Skin and the mall-coven comedy Forbidden Fruits we covered recently, and it stands out in that crowd on pure atmosphere.

Where to Find Camp

CAMP is on demand now via Amazon, Apple, Fandango, Google Play, YouTube, and the Letterboxd Video Store, which is a fittingly on-brand storefront for this particular film. It runs 111 minutes.

Theatrical dates continue, including the Boedecker Theater in Boulder on July 24, The Beacon Cinema in Seattle from July 24 through 29, Northwest Film Forum in Seattle from July 25 into early August, and Living Room Theaters in Indianapolis August 20 through 23.

If you can see it in a room with other people, do. This is a film about the specific alchemy of a group in the woods, and it plays better when you are not alone.