There's a huge difference between horror comedy and horror camp. The names alone should leave this division apparent; it's all a matter of intention. As a positive example of the former category, let's look at Drag Me to Hell, by far the genre's most successful entry in the past few years. It's goofy, but it's also sad and sinister, with a really cruel perspective on karma informing the story. The comedy works because it supports the absurdity of the horror. Horror camp, meanwhile, is often produced as a result of singular horror elements that are not executed well enough but are treated as if they are. Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp delineates the relationship between two oppositional creative impulses in a camp work: "the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice." And as Sontag says, "intending to be campy is [probably] always harmful" - look at the repetitive, tedious deluge of Z-grade failures produced by SyFy, who are content to throw us paint-by-numbers shittiness and have the temerity to pass it off as a good time. Troll 2 is an awesome example of unintentional camp, a prime example of why bad horror movies brought us so joy in the first place and why intentionally bad horror movies are usually just desperate in comparison. It clearly meant something to the people creating it, but their complete lack of talent rendered it "artificial" to anyone watching.
