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The Unnatural Art of Being: Cinema's Camp Evolution

Meryl Streep (in Death Becomes Her (1992) ) in a feathered costume is lifted by dancers on a stage with sparkling blue lights, creating a glamorous, celebratory mood.
Death Becomes Her (1992)

Very few aesthetic movements have meandered as far from their origins as that of camp — that deliciously unnatural sensibility that once served as both armour and art for the most marginalised of voices. What began in the shadows of queer underground culture as a subversive celebration of identity has, over the decades, been transfigured into something far more palatable and considerably less dangerous. The evolution of camp in film tells a tale, not merely of aesthetic evolution, but of cultural assimilation, where the radical edge of theatrical transgression has been dulled by gradual mainstream appropriation.


Camp as a stylistic movement, as Susan Sontag put forth in her seminal 1964 work “Notes on Camp”, represents a mode of aestheticism rooted in artifice and exaggeration. In cinema, this translates to an embrace of the theatrical over the realistic, the fantastically stylised over the firmly banal, the gloriously baroque over the minimally restrained. Camp sees everything in quotation marks: not a tragedy, but a "tragedy". The cinematic language of camp speaks in hyperbole. Camp tends to scream where other styles may whisper.


From the towering wigs and impossible eyelashes of John Waters' Divine to the candy-colored nightmares of Almodóvar's early work, camp cinema has always operated under the principle that restraint is the enemy of revelation. The aesthetic is seen as privileging style over substance, creating what Sontag described as "the consistently aesthetic experience of the world".


Where conventional cinema often strives to veil its contrived nature, camp cinema flaunts its artificiality with gleeful abandon. Here, the painted backdrops are deliberately visible and the emotions intentionally heightened. This isn't a reflection of a filmmaker's accidental incompetence, but of their intentional subversion of norms; a conscious rejection of cinema's more realist traditions in favour of something more authentic about its own theatricality.


The relationship between camp and its queer roots runs deep. Camp represents an essential strategy for expression and survival cultivated by queer communities. In the pre-Stonewall era, when homosexuality was criminalised and persecution or erasure awaited those caught outside heteronormative norms, camp functioned almost as a mechanism for finding like-minded individuals.


Camp cinema emerged from this tradition of coded communication, creating films that could speak simultaneously to insider and outsider audiences without fully revealing their subversive intentions to hostile mainstream culture. Camp cinema, like that of John Waters, presents characters so outrageously transgressive that they could be dismissed as mere shock theatre, while simultaneously offering powerful statements about gender fluidity and social rebellion.


This connection to marginalised communities gave early camp cinema its particular bite. It wasn't only aesthetic rebellion, but a form of political resistance, using quirks to dissect the dominant sensibilities while simultaneously contributing to alternative communities bonded by a shared 'outsider status'. The campiness in these films was the politics, wrapped in enough theatrics to make it both palatable and subversive. As they say: if you knew, you knew.


The evolution of camp cinema can be traced through distinct phases, each emerging as camp’s relationship to mainstream culture has changed. The early underground era of the 60s and early 70s produced some of camp's most uncompromising and radical expressions, films that wore their queercoded nature and veiled political message as a badge of honour. Subsequently, the late 70s and 80s saw camp begin its migration toward broader cultural visibility. 


The iconic Rocky Horror Picture Show served as the connection between the era of underground expression and that of mainstream co-option, creating the exemplar for how camp in cinema could maintain its edge and have commercial success.


The period also saw the emergence of 'high camp' with films that employed camp within more sophisticated structures. Pedro Almodóvar's early works, like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, are indicative of how camp sensibilities could be fitted into complex narrative filmmaking. These films proved that camp could be both artistically ambitious and culturally subversive.


The 90s brought both the apotheosis and the beginning of the end for camp cinema's radical edge. Films like But I'm a Cheerleader, Death Becomes Her, and Mars Attacks! represented camp's full integration into mainstream film culture. However, while these works retained the theatrical sensibility characteristic of camp, they often lacked the political urgency that had defined earlier camp cinema. The overarching cinema landscape today reveals a similar pattern of camp's appropriation without its cultural substance. Superhero films, beloved by audiences, often use camp's visual excess, theatrical dialogue, and stagey action, but in the service of conservative narratives about heroism and institutional authority and integrity.


The age of streaming has also altered camp's cultural function. Where camp cinema once required audiences to actively seek out underground venues and alternative exhibition spaces, today's camp content arrives pre-packaged and algorithm-optimised for individual consumption. 


Camp also incorporates elements of communal, ritualistic cultures that have been an intrinsic part of the movement — from Rocky Horror's midnight screenings to drag ballroom culture. These facets of camp also sought to provide safe third spaces for communities that often struggle to translate to digital platforms designed around individual user engagement rather than collective experience. Resultedly, camp has become another misnomer, used incorrectly in common parlance. 


The transformation of camp from underground resistance to mainstream entertainment represents more than simple cultural evolution; it signals the loss of one of cinema's most powerful tools for social critique and community building. Original camp cinema didn't just entertain audiences—it challenged, disturbed, and ultimately changed them. It created spaces where social outsiders could see themselves reflected not as problems to be solved but as communities to be celebrated.


The danger that characterised early camp cinema was never merely shock value for its own sake but a necessary component of its cultural function. It served as ultimate liberation; proof that social boundaries could not just be crossed but obliterated. Modern camp, sanitised for digestible consumption, has lost this transformative edge.


What we're left with is camp as a style guide rather than a worldview, camp as an aesthetic choice rather than a political necessity. The irony here is quite profound: in seeking to gain mainstream traction, camp has consequently lost the very facets that made it worth celebrating. We've traded authentic transgression for comfortable familiarity.


The future of camp in cinema is uncertain. Perhaps new marginalised communities will develop their own versions of camp's strategies, creating new forms of cultural resistance, or perhaps digital technologies might enable new forms of community and performance that recapture something of the movement's original political undertones.


Or perhaps camp's mainstream moment represents its final act: the culmination of a cultural trajectory that began with social outcasts and ended with celebrity influencers. In that case, camp's greatest contribution to cinema may ultimately be historical, a reminder of what cinematic rebellion looks like and what cultural communities can accomplish when they still have everything to lose and nothing to hide.


The story of camp's evolution is ultimately a story about authenticity, community, and the price of mainstream acceptance. It continues to remind us that not all cultural victories are unambiguous triumphs. Important artistic movements being incorporated into the mainstream is not always the rousing success it's made out to be. 


Subversive movements that lose that very quality often morph from being forever in the margins, forever dangerous, to existing in the comfortable embrace of respectability. So perhaps, in cinema, as in life, the most meaningful revolutions are often the ones that never quite succeed and never quite surrender.




Edited by Tatenda Dlali


Anish (he/him) is a student of Political Science and the Associate Editor (Entertainment) at Political Pandora. His research interests encompass global politics and its influence on various landscapes, as well as an interest in film, television, and pop culture.  



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Keywords: Susan Sontag, Notes Camp, John Waters, Divine Cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, Rocky Horror, Queer Roots, Camp Cinema, Cultural Assimilation, Theatrical Excess, Marginalised Voices, Drag Culture, Underground Film, Queer Subversion, High Camp, Mainstream Appropriation, Camp Aesthetic, Radical Edge, Film Movements, Camp Politics, Streaming Era, Camp Legacy, Visual Hyperbole, Social Critique, Camp Evolution

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