The Camper (2026)
Brianna Lee is one of those filmmakers who simply does the lot. On her debut feature The Troll she wrote, directed, produced, edited and took the lead role, and it earned her a nomination for Best Performance in a Debut Feature when it world premiered at the 34th Raindance Film Festival in June. It is a psychological horror about a TikTok star who hunts down the anonymous troll tormenting her and then quietly dismantles their life, and it is exactly the sort of nervy, of-the-moment genre filmmaking that independent horror does better than anyone.
The Camper is one of her latest shorts, and it screens at the Northern Horror Fest in Bergenfield, New Jersey, a small, defiantly grassroots one-day festival now in its eighth year, built to give independent horror and thriller filmmakers a room, an audience and a proper shot at being seen. Lee sent it over ahead of the screening, and I went in knowing nothing at all about it, which turned out to be the right way to do it.
Brianna Lee sent this one over ahead of its screening at the Northern Horror Fest, and it's a cracking little short.
Lee does just about everything on it. She writes, directs, edits, produces and takes the lead role, which is the sort of one-woman-band effort you see all the time in indie horror and which usually shows in the seams. It doesn't here. The Camper is tight, controlled and confident.
The suspense is the thing. Lee knows how to hold a moment and let it stretch, and she builds the dread patiently rather than reaching for cheap noise every thirty seconds. The acting is genuinely good too, which is not something I can always say about horror at this level.
And then there's the jumpscare. I'm not going to tell you where it lands, but I will admit I very nearly needed a change of underwear. It's properly set up, it's earned, and it absolutely got me. That is a hard thing to pull off on someone who has watched as much of this stuff as I have.
The twist I did not see coming. Not even slightly. I spend a good deal of my life trying to get ahead of films, and this one flatly refused to let me, which is a compliment I don't hand out often.
Three and a half stars. A really good indie short horror, made by someone who clearly knows exactly what she is doing. Lee's debut feature The Troll premiered at Raindance this year and earned her a Best Performance nomination, and on the evidence of this, that doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Catch it at the Northern Horror Fest if you can.
The short form is where horror has always been at its most dangerous. There is nowhere to hide, no second act to coast through, no time to explain yourself. You either build the dread and land the blow or you don't. Lee does both, and she does it without a fraction of the money or the safety net that the films frightening people in multiplexes have. That is the whole argument for paying attention to independent genre filmmaking, and The Camper makes it in a matter of minutes. I will be watching whatever she does next, and I suspect a good many other people will be too.
Reviewed from a screener provided by the director ahead of the film's screening at the Northern Horror Fest in Bergenfield, New Jersey, where The Camper screens on 17 July 2026.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Northern Horror Fest: The Girl We Let In (2026)
More from the 2020s: Look Back (2024), The Whale (2022), All That's Left of You (2025)
