Sleepaway Camp and the juvenile arena of summer camp

A case for the most cruel slasher flick of all time

Say what you want about the competing slasher franchises of horror’s halcyon age of video rental. Halloween may have set the pace and A Nightmare on Elm Street may have breathed life back into the genre but not one of them inspired greedy ripoffs like my personal favorite of the bunch, Friday the 13th. Madman and The Burning hinged on campfire tales and urban legends at summer camp to craft a story around and walked in Jason’s lumbering footsteps to signal to teenagers that their movies were just like that one with the hockey mask that you all went crazy for last summer. Summer camp was familiar back then, too. Kids still looked forward to it. The concept was relatable. It was more than just a theme to color your maniac killer horror move with.

I went to camp twice. Once in the summer of 1986 and then again with this insane middle school outing called Conservation Camp in 1988. We called it Concentration Camp and even without a masked murderer on the loose, it was an absolute Darwinian nightmare. You’re camped out in the middle of nowhere with nothing between you and the forest’s apex predators and biting insects but a dilapidated bunkhouse or a thin layer of canvas tent. You were a child left afloat by your parents in a shark tank of predatory children and your anxiety was blood in the water. Counselors, the only thing around that stood between you and mayhem, were children only a few years older than yourself and you were left with no choice but to participate in the planned activities or face the scorn of your fellow campers who want to know what’s wrong with you. You gay or something? The hostility and tribalism of bunkhouses greatly outweighed the camaraderie and one or two weeks away from home may as well have been the entire summer since the experience was such a fucking nightmare. Packed in together for as long as you are, removed from society and with authority symbolic at best, summer camp placed you one degree removed from a Lord of the Flies breakdown of civility. If anything in the fragile web of summer camp were to go awry, the kids would resort to cannibalism before the rations even ran out simply because kids left to their own devices are fucking maniacs.

Friday the 13th never really captured this aspect since most of the movies set at a campground take place before the kids arrive to account for the fact that the cast playing the counselors are grown-ass adults. Even in the heyday of the summer camp slasher movie, murdering kids was still considered taboo. That is, until the movie Sleepaway Camp came around (I know. The Burning, too. But only Fisher Stevens looks like a kid in that movie).

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For this article, I’m going to leave out the sexual components of this movie for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’m not terribly qualified to speak on its queer themes and secondly, they’ve been reappraised to death by people who are qualified. Suffice to say that its treatment of queer people is fucking gross and cruel. Before A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, there was this movie, equal parts trans/homophobic and gay as hell. It’s a co-ed camp full of boys in tiny shorts that are super into getting naked with each other and getting some kid’s face planted directly between their cheeks. With exceptions few, none are terribly interested in the abundant teenage girls all around them.

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But even by the remaining characteristics of the movie, Sleepaway Camp gets my vote for the most cruel and unpleasant slasher movie of them all.

All of them.

Well, cruelest among its contemporaries, I suppose. I’m excluding some of the more modern slasher movies like Laid To Rest and Hatchet. I consider everything released post-Scream to be of a third wave of slashers made with tongue planted firmly in cheek and inescapably influenced by those that came before. The originals in the golden age of the slasher had to contend with a much tighter MPAA and an anti-horror movie crusade led by the likes of Gene Siskel. They couldn’t yet rely entirely on the home video market and because of that, had to prostrate themselves before a shadowy cabal that demanded they butcher their movie to remove the scenes where they graphically butcher their cast and still, miraculously, Sleepaway Camp slipped under the radar. Where most slasher flicks of the time fixate on pointy sticks and sharp edges which draw blood, Sleepaway Camp bucks the trend with a series of nasty, nasty kills done by means that made it hard for the MPAA to object by the measure of their own code

But even before the bodies start piling up, the movie’s baked-in brutality cuts through the fog like a light house. Camp Arawak is an arena stocked thickly with the meanest fourteen years olds you’ve ever seen. These kids are like angry dogs and they’re at each other’s throats from the moment the movie starts. The only likable kid in the pack is Angela’s cousin, Ricky, whose ferocity is as sharp as everyone else’s but only surfaces as a shield for Angela against the escalating terror of the feral children around her.

Friends are few and enemies surround them in every scene and the shit talk is thickly delivered with savage malice via Long Island accents. Angela is immediately singled out as the vulnerable weirdo and her peers launch a relentless attack because of her outsider status. If there’s anyone in this brutalist exercise in horror film that I identified most closely with, it was her. Even during my first viewing of the movie way back in the day, before the internet gleefully spoiled the ending in pursuit of dank memes, after she was identified as the killer who beheaded a child whose only crime was being into her, I still couldn’t fault her for violently getting even. In spite of deadly bees and a towering pot of boiling water, every victim in the movie is such a mad dog that you get the feeling that if she didn’t get them first, one of them would have gotten her. The taunting and bullying in Sleepaway Camp escalates in a way that is truly awful, going to a place that could have ended with Angela’s death by drowning. Though, maybe I should cool it, because Judy’s death, no matter how barbed and terrible she is, is just the worst

But if these bloodthirsty kids don’t get you first, the camp staff will, evidenced right out of the gate by a pedophile cook whose sexual predation is casually laughed off by coworkers who should have taken him out behind the mess hall, stomped him to death and then left his body in the forest for the animals to dispose of. Camp Arawak is hell on earth. No one is in charge and everyone is out to get everyone else for the simple sport of it. It’s all wailing and gnashing teeth and I’m quite frankly amazed that any one of those kids in attendance looks forward to it summer after summer since being there is nothing less than a bloodsport and surviving it even before Angela’s killing spree is nothing less than fucking amazing! The flick’s extremely unpleasant deaths seem mild by comparison to the ordinary viciousness on display. Even early on before the mayhem has escalated to truly concerning degrees, a comparatively innocent prank with a girl on the lake with a boy reeks hard of the origins of the It’s Always Sunny ‘implication’ joke. But where Dennis ultimately persuades Mac that he doesn’t intend to harm any women, the same claim can’t be made of this scene which, if dressed up in fetish leather and roaring engines, wouldn’t have been out of place in Mad Max.

Am I being hyperbolic? A little. Do I love this movie? More than I should. Sleepaway Camp lives in the shadow of its troubling twist ending and because of this, I feel like it manages to skirt past critique of it’s vicious cast, the inexplicable relationship between counselor Meg and crusty camp-owner, Mel, casual indifference to child rape, what is quite possibly the most deranged performance in any horror movie by Desiree Gould as Aunt Martha, and a series of murder set-pieces operating well-above the norms of its contemporary horror movie mayhem. Sleepaway Camp is just wildly fucked up, from wall to wall.