Weekly Update: Supplementary Notes on Camp

We had ourselves an early Horror Movie Sunday this week — a Horror Movie Saturday, if you will — watching both the original Predator and the new prequel Prey, which represents an enormous turning point in this otherwise very macho franchise. Amber Midthunder absolutely nails the Ripley-esque role of Naru, a young and extremely talented member of the Comanche tribe whose one shortcoming has been her inability to hunt. She sets out to prove herself capable, and damn does she ever succeed.

Apart from that, we've got a new Judgment in the works, and we're still plugging away at the stuff we announced last week.

Upcoming Judgment: Supplementary Notes on Camp

We had some internet conversations this week that got us thinking about camp, irony, and meta-ness in horror. Specifically, we found ourselves in the interesting position of defending the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer film against Buffy fans, who fiercely love everything in the Buffyverse except that film, which they despise and disregard as a failure — a pale and talentless rendering, they say, of the great and glorious paragon of feminist perfection that the late-1990s-early-2000s BtVS television show would become.

Listen, we love the show. It's also obviously better than the movie in almost every way. But it's not perfect, and the movie doesn't deserve the bad rap it gets. So we decided to write a Judgment.

(This is part of that whole evolution of our Judgments we talked about a month or so ago. Rather than only short reviews of horror media, we want to include short articles on all kinds of subjects on which no one asked our opinions.)

Anyway, expect a Judgement later this week on the Buffy movie and on camp, self-awareness, and irony in horror more generally. We're gonna get all pedantic about what camp is and what it's not. It'll be fun.