‘Camp’ and the case for the slow horror film: Avalon Fast on shooting witchcraft in a remote Canadian forest

On 26 June 2026, Variety published an interview with Avalon Fast, the writer-director behind the debut feature Camp, and the framing she offers is unusually precise for a young horror filmmaker. She does not call the film a thriller, a possession story, or a folk-horror exercise. She calls it, in plain language, “a bunch of girls in the woods doing weird stuff” — a self-designation that doubles as a manifesto for the kind of patient, atmospheric filmmaking she is trying to make.

Fast, who also wrote the screenplay, pitched Camp as an attempt to conjure “sacredness” and “magic” on a remote Canadian shoot, according to the Variety interview published 26 June 2026. The result is a visually distinctive horror debut that leans on ritual, landscape, and ensemble performance rather than the jump-scare economy that has come to dominate American studio horror over the last decade.

A debut built around atmosphere, not arithmetic

The most striking choice in Camp is its pacing. Fast treats the forest as a character rather than a backdrop, and her camera dwells on small, unhurried acts — gathering, chanting, lighting — that accumulate into dread. The effect, as Fast describes it in the Variety interview, is intended to evoke a sense of ceremony: the viewer is not so much scared as slowly inducted into a private rite. That is a hard sell in a market that has trained audiences to expect a shock every ninety seconds, and it is the central wager of the film.

The genre tag Fast invents — “girls in the woods doing weird stuff” — is also a small piece of positioning. It places Camp inside a recognisable lineage of female-led folk horror (the lineage that runs from The Craft to The Witch to Midsommar) while quietly refusing the more marketable labels that distributors tend to slap on such projects. Fast is not pitching a “final girl” picture, nor a paranormal thriller, nor a coming-of-age drama with a horror frame. She is pitching a craft film about witchcraft, and she wants it read that way.

The remote-shoot logic

A remote Canadian location is doing real work here, beyond the obvious tax-incentive arithmetic that drives much north-of-the-border production. Fast’s stated aim — to extract “sacredness” and “magic” from the place itself — implies a shoot in which the crew’s isolation is part of the method. That kind of production mirrors a wider trend in independent horror: directors increasingly choosing locations that impose their own weather, daylight cycle, and access constraints, on the theory that constraint produces texture that a soundstage cannot fake.

The trade-off is logistical. Remote shoots mean smaller crews, longer days, and a narrower margin for error. They also tend to require directors who can hold a coherent visual language over weeks of variable light without the safety net of a controlled environment. Fast’s interview suggests she is comfortable with that trade — she talks about the shoot in terms of mood and discovery rather than in terms of schedule or coverage, which is the vocabulary of a filmmaker who arrived with a strong point of view and was prepared to defend it in the field.

What the film is, and what it is not

It is worth being clear-eyed about the gap between Fast’s stated intentions and what audiences will actually see. A film that promises “sacredness” and “magic” on a tight independent budget is making a claim that only the finished cut can cash. The Variety interview is, by its nature, a director’s pitch — a controlled environment in which the filmmaker gets to define the terms. Whether the film delivers on those terms will be a question for critics and audiences once it travels beyond the festival-and-press-screening circuit.

Two plausible counter-reads of the project deserve naming. The first is the marketing counter-read: that Camp will be sold to distributors and audiences in much more conventional terms than Fast prefers — “elevated horror,” “A24-adjacent,” “feminist folk horror” — and that her precise genre designation will be quietly retired in the trailer. The second is the genre-counter-read: that any film about women and witchcraft in a forest is going to inherit a long history of tropes about the monstrous feminine and the woods-as-threshold, and that no amount of intentional framing on the director’s part fully escapes that inheritance. Fast appears to be aware of both risks; her insistence on “weird stuff” rather than “witchcraft” in the Variety interview reads as an attempt to keep the film’s own mythology, rather than the genre’s, in the foreground.

Stakes for the slow-film horror lane

The wider stakes are modest but real. Independent horror over the last decade has split into a high-concept, high-shock commercial lane (the Insidious, Terrifier, Smile branch) and a slower, more auteurist lane (the Saint Maud, Talk to Me, Hereditary branch). Camp is planting a flag in the second branch at a moment when that branch is under genuine commercial pressure. Mid-budget festival horror has struggled to clear theatrical thresholds in the post-pandemic window, and the films that have broken through — Talk to Me in 2023, Longlegs in 2024 — have generally done so with a genre hook aggressive enough to survive algorithmic marketing.

A film that refuses to advertise itself as a thriller, and that asks audiences to sit with ritual rather than recoil from it, is making a bet that there is still room in the market for that kind of work. Fast’s interview reads as quietly confident on that question. The Variety piece does not report box-office projections, distribution deals, or festival premiere dates — those details will arrive when they arrive — but it does establish that Camp is being positioned, at least by its director, as a craft object first and a content property second.

That positioning matters for the broader indie-horror ecosystem. Every slow, atmospheric debut that lands — or that fails to land — sends a signal back through the development pipeline about what kinds of bets financiers and producers are willing to make next. Camp is too small a project to move that needle on its own, but it sits inside a cohort of recent female-directed folk-horror debuts that are quietly testing the demand for horror built on mood rather than mechanics.

What remains uncertain, on the evidence available, is the film’s commercial fate and its critical reception beyond the sympathetic context of a director-profile interview. The Variety piece does not disclose a release date, a distributor, or a festival bow. It also does not name the cast or the producers in the excerpted material available here. Readers interested in those specifics will need to wait for the next press cycle — a reminder that coverage of a debut feature at the profile stage is, by design, more about a director’s stated intentions than about the film itself.

How Monexus framed this: we treated the Variety interview as a director’s pitch and quoted it narrowly, rather than extrapolating into claims about the finished film’s quality, commercial prospects, or place in horror history that the source material does not support.