Five-Legged Iguana

13 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
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CAM

(July 2018)

“... I don't do public shows, I don't tell my guys I love them, and I don’t fake my orgasms.

“My rules.”

So says Madeline Brewer’s Alice Ackerman (AKA the cam girl who goes by the handle “Lola_Lola”).

Living her secret life without her mother’s knowledge, struggling to break the Top 50 on FGL (FreeGirlsLive), Alice’s world is turned upside down when a doppelgänger steals her online identity.

“Oh, tonight went so well! I told you people are craving crazy shows!”

“They are! Those guys get so nasty!”

“Yeah… What the f*ck was that?”

Director Daniel Goldhaber’s feature debut, Cam sees Brewer (exceptional as Janine on The Handmaid’s Tale) portray a simple working girl earnestly trying to make it big in her line of work, which involves constantly keeping her "guys"' attention fixed solely on her, lest their libidos wander and turn to the competition literally just a click away.

There is no judgment in the screenplay Goldhaber works from (written by former cam girl Isa Mazzei), no moralizing. Alice’s ordeal isn’t punishment for doing something wrong. If anything, the chilling scenario Cam presents suggests that cam girls are particularly susceptible to this very specific (and very insidious) form of horror film identity theft.

“We were brought together for a reason. Unexpected things happen… to test us. That’s what this is. You’re being tested, but… you’re strong. You’ll make it through.”

After all, we live in a world of Instagram filters, deepfakes, and the persona curation that goes on all the time on social media platforms, where nothing you see online can be assured to be genuine, to be “real.”

Where images, snippets of video, quotes or posts, can be taken out of context, co-opted, and used for purposes entirely divorced from their original intent.

Mazzei and Goldhaber’s tale takes that reality and pushes it into identity horror territory, where a girl who works under an obviously fake name is ousted from her online life by another fake, and can’t seem to get help from anyone other than herself.

“I’ll take care of you, my chickadee.”

Cam is an unsettling and haunting tale of identity and truth in the 21^st online century, where both can simply become mutable commodities on the web, and perhaps the only weapon that can be used in their defense, is our own personal agency.

““I’m, like, this f*cking close to breaking Top 50! I can taste it!”

(Cam OS courtesy of screenanarchy.com.)