Yellowjackets is a show about a school camp that never ends. It's the scariest thing I've ever seen

If I got trapped in the wilderness with my school chums, I would have cut my own leg off and eaten it

Spoilers for Yellowjackets season 1, but NONE for s2

One of the (many) brutal deaths from the first season of Yellowjackets was when the religious Laura Lee tries to fly an old plane out of the forest and find help, only for it to explode and immediately kill her.

It’s shocking, mostly for the speed that it occurs, but unsurprising – and compared to many of the other deaths and injuries: being eaten, attacked by wolves, set on fire, having your leg amputated, not even very gory. If I’m being honest, being quickly blown up might even be preferable to spending an entire winter trapped on the world’s longest school camp.

When I think about the prospect of spending even an hour with a bunch of unsupervised high school kids from the nineties, I too would throw caution to the wind and try to fly away in a leaky death trap.

Imagine, trundling off to Sovereign Hill (melbourne reference) or Old Sydney Town to learn about gold and bonnets, in a hot bus with fake leather seats that stick to your legs, surrounded by jeering teen boys who stink of BO and Lynx Africa, clumps of sickly-sweet vanilla scented girls whispering about you, overseen by a perpetually grumpy science teacher drenched in divorced energy – and then getting stuck there, for weeks and weeks, and months and months, unable to leave.

I think I spent the entirety of every school camp I ever went on hoping I would explode violently.

Extremely divorced voice: now, girls, c’mon, lights out please, we have a big day tomorrow and I don’t want to hear another word

The excursion to thredbo that never ends

Yellowjackets is an interesting setup for a mystery/ horror / thriller – we have the nineties storyline that tells the survival horror story of a girls soccer team getting stranded in the remote wilderness after a plane crash. Then we have the current day storyline where the survivors deal with their trauma, their guilt, and mysterious murders. I love this show so much – watching season 1 last year was probably the viewing experience that I was most engaged for, that made me think the most.

There is a paranormal spookiness to the story, as well as the brutality of being stranded and hungry and having to survive. Much of the horror comes from this. But a huge amount of the tension and terror is drawn directly from the awful idea of not only having to attend a school camp, but never being able to leave.

The show expertly draws on this juicy fountain of horror, revelling in the teenage misfortunes just as much as the terror of things like wolves and spooky cabin skeletons. Along with survival and cannibalism and amateur surgery, we have teen pregnancy and traumatic proms, jealousy and mean-girl cliques. It’s extremely faithful to the storylines of nineties teen dramas - its like they teleported the entire cast of Degrassi Jnr High into the Hunger Games.

This is more than just a fun setting, or nostalgia for gen x/ elder millennials. It’s a juicy source of horror in its own right. Buffy the Vampire Slayer slammed Sunnydale High on top of a mouth to hell for a reason - because high school is already hell for many people. The supernatural occurrences were only the cherry on top of an already distressing situation. As we saw throughout Buffy, it only took a nudge for chaos and anarchy to reign supreme through the school - the swim team turning into mutant fish people to gain a competitive edge, bullied kids going invisible, horny and predatory teen boys getting possessed by a pack of ghost hyenas. All the drudgery and fear and wildness of highschool hyperbolised through the metaphor of supernatural experience. It’s why Lord of the Flies is a classic text - there’s something frontier about a high school, chaos barely kept in control, that can devolve at any moment.

Yellowjackets is ostensibly about a plane crash, but many of the problems, much of the horror that they go through is stuff they brought with them from high school.

Starburst and claustrophobia

I remember going on a school camp in year 10, which would have been just out of the nineties – i’m not sure exactly where we went, but I remember listening to two CDs on repeat in the bus for hours (Loverama by Custard and Celebrity Skin by Hole), desperately trying to block out the hooting maelstrom of my classmates. We had to stay overnight, and I remember the absolute dread of having to sleep in a room full of teenage boys, my natural enemy.

In a kind of conciliatory gesture, like throwing a big juicy steak into a bear enclosure and hoping it left me alone, I entered the cabin and chucked a couple of packets of Starburst candy onto the table. It was met with stunned silence, and then furor - apparently, one of my classmates had LOST his packet of Starburst earlier in the day, and they now believed I had stolen it. “Why would I steal your lollies only to give them back to you?” i asked - but it was too late. I was forever known as “Starburst” after that, which considering the other things I was called at school were generally slurs, I didn’t so much mind.

It’s a silly example, but it always brings to mind the way pack dynamics work in high school, and how little power and agency you have.

In fact, that’s the specific root of the horror we see in Yellowjackets, in the school camp limbo experience. There’s rarely a situation as an adult that I can’t leave, can’t access some form of control over. In fact, anyone exerting control over you as an adult is usually open to some form of official reprisal - the police, HR, some kind of powerful ombudsman. There’s never a music concert or boring talk or painful house party that I can’t just ghost from if I’m bored. There’s not a job that I can’t rage-quit from if they exploit me too hard. But in highschool… I couldn’t leave for years. There was nowhere to go.

There’s a claustrophobia at the heart of the horror of Yellowjackets – a constriction, a lack of agency. Yes, it’s being stranded in the wilderness, but it’s also being stranded in the powerlessness of being a high school teen.

this is unrealistic, because every sports uniform I ever wore made me look like a team’s mascot had to get taken to the seaside to recover from tuberculosis

Hate crimed! In the nineties

One of the realest things about Yellowjackets is the fact that we get to see the adult, current-day versions of the teens who did survive the ordeal (high school/ plane crash). It’s an exploration of trauma and guilt, with the events of the crash hanging over them, still defining them despite their fervent wishes otherwise.

It’s a fear I have myself, and one that I think unites a lot of people. I think queer people of my generation in particular share this feeling of wanting to distance themselves from their high school trauma. Psychologist Liam Casey writes about this a little in this wonderful and superbly edited piece for The Conversation about Heartstopper, and the conflicting feelings it can bring up with queers on their aging journey, who had negative experiences due to their sexuality in high school.

“Researchers call this phenomenon minority stress. The cumulative negative effects of these threatening social conditions can ultimately lead to isolation, depression, and anxiety," writes Casey.

“The same pain is being described by people approaching middle age and those still in their teens. The show seems to plant a seed that makes them wonder how life might have played out if their high school experience was supportive rather than frightening.”

Yellowjackets actually does a lovely service by glossing over the rampant school homophobia of the nineties. There are unremarked upon queer relationships depicted in the show, that are traumatic not for being queer, but due to the various wolf bite injuries that get involved.Regardless, it still channels that pain, without forcing us to relive it via depictions of homophobia.

Having the “middle-aged” cast depicted as equally as the teens show us that this trauma leaves deep scars, that we can grow and become powerful and self-actualised, but that the horror of our experiences and our previous powerlessness does still stay with us in some way.

I’m currently writing a non-fic book about my highschool/ university life throughout the nineties and the noughties. An excellent person on Twitter was talking about the age-old and boring “queer is a slur” discourse with me, and we were talking about how the word “gay” was the big slur in the nineties. They then sent me this tweet, which I think is going to be the title of my book:

Fagetti Spaghetti @sanitarypipe

@PatrickLenton

It’s going to be a tricky book, because in 1997 I was very brutally hate-crimed, beaten up and abused for my perceived homosexuality. It was so traumatic that I now don’t remember much of what happened, or even of the next few years, which I’m told is apparently a fairly common trauma response.

As a result, I don’t really think much about high school, or keep in touch with anyone beyond one or two special people. Much of my experience is blank - but just like with the adult storyline of Yellowjackets, I’ve come to see that the blankness itself is still something affecting me, driving my attitudes and experiences, like when a tree grows around something hard and unyielding.

I identify most with the superb Melanie Lynskey’s character, Shauna, who as an adult has done her best to push down the experiences of her youth, but retains a sharp, cutthroat edge that pokes through at strange moments. I can sense myself when that happens to me. Sometimes it’s weird and bad, sometimes its unexpected endurance.

I hate the idea that I’m still affected by that trauma, but Yellowjackets shows that nothing we can do: repression, spirituality, obsession, can actually make us escape the past. We just have to accept it somehow, I guess - but Yellowjackets is a horror, so the characters cannot accept it, cannot escape it, are doomed by it. The consequences of this trauma will haunt them - it’s a ghost story.

You gotta laugh (about the cannibalism)

“Yellowjackets is this bleak tragedy and it’s all going to end in tears, but there’s sharp comedy in it, which I think people respond to? I respond to it. It’s my favourite thing about it.”

This is a quote from my interview with iconic queer Liv Hewson, who plays Van in the teen Yellowjackets storyline.

Van is given much of the humour in this storyline - she is sardonic and witty, even after being set on fire multiple times. In fact, there is a deep vein of comedy in the show, that also feels incredibly real. I don’t think it’s an answer, or a solution, or even necessarily good - but I adore the fact that Liv’s character responds to trauma with humour. It is a trait that I see shared by so many of my queer friends, a trait I lean on heavily myself. It’s why i’ll describe my book about being bashed so badly in high school that I lost a few years as a “comedy” - it’s because I learned early on that I could keep crying, or I could laugh about it. This is how endurance and strength can manifest, by mocking our own pain.

Furthermore, I could get some attention and applause by transmogrifying my trauma into funny anecdotes. It doesn’t always translate - I told a story on Twitter the other day about how in high school, a classmates dad lured me into the army reserves and then spent an hour yelling at me to join the army and “become a man” as a form of conversion therapy. I thought this is a super weird and somewhat funny story, but I immediately had lots of people “sending love” and saying how sorry they were. Some traumas are like scars, others are like weird looking birthmarks that you enjoy grossing people out with.

Yellowjackets draws on some specific aspects of nineties high school trauma - the music, the clothes, the references, all make it extremely applicable to me, to my blighted generation. But Yellowjackets is such a deeply affecting show because it taps something much more universal than the experiences of a single demographic, beyond a single defined portion of your life like high school, or experience like a school camp - it drinks deeply from the horror of being trapped and powerless, and the inevitability of being defined by your trauma of that time for the rest of your life.

It shows us that trauma is a school camp, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot get on the bus to go home.

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