Certain horror films have a knack for making viewers ask themselves, “Okay, what are we doing here?” and in this regard, 1983’s Sleepaway Camp is a prime example of the sometimes-edifying effectiveness of the tonal shift, which may say more about our preconceptions than what a work is really doing—and building toward—all along.
Boasting the undeniably clever tagline “You won’t be coming home!”—a splatter spin on Thomas Wolfe’s admonition that you can’t go home again—the film tells the story of Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) and his cousin Angela (Felissa Rose) and the latest time they head off to camp for the summer, which they do annually. They’re more like brother and sister because they live together with Ricky’s imperiously weird mother (Desiree Gould). Angela is borderline mute and totes around a heaping of trauma on account of that time some careless motorboating kids killed her dad and brother at the lake one day as she and her father’s boyfriend looked on, orphaning Angela because it wasn’t like she was then going to live with this widowed boyfriend, and who knows what Mom’s deal is, if she’s even around.
Angela gets bullied by the other children at camp. We sense that many of these kids have gone from one hostile environment to another, and they’re acting out now that they’re better able to get away with things and not take a hiding or have been raised by people who shouldn’t be raising anyone. Ricky is her protector, but you can’t be everywhere at once, and a lot of bad stuff goes down in those mean-girl cabins.
Critics roasted Sleepaway Camp as garbled, exploitative slasher dreck, but it helps if we don’t view the film literally. There’s a tendency for critics to want a work to be of a single strain or piece. All serious or not all serious, for example. The critic has their preferred modes and then praises the work that matches their prescriptive notions. This creates an issue for the films—or records, books, symphonies, buildings, ballets, etc.—that are sui generis. And while that may be too lofty a claim to make for Sleepaway Camp, it’s definitely its own film with its own reasons for doing what it does.
The acting, for instance, is bad/overblown enough in spots to be intentional. Humor and gravity co-exist, and the former isn’t the ironic variety. The movie doesn’t strive to be hip or meta. It’s a mélange. One minute you’re up, the next you’re down. Director/writer Robert Hiltzik has given us a stylized picture that’s—gulp—borderline art house-y. Considering the subject matter, the age of the characters—that is, it qualifies as being another teen slice-’em-and-dice-’em affair—this was a no-no. And while the movie succeeds in manifesting its ideas, those results aren’t likely to track for those with an attitude of, “A movie should be like this, and this, and this!” but rather people who come to whatever they come to asking, “Okay, what do you have for me? Let’s see what you got and how you go about it.”
You’ll be about halfway through before you realize that many of the campers are actually counselors. There are a strange number of adults at Camp Arawak. If you’re 25 and working as a summer camp counselor and telling the boys on your team that they better win the big capture-the-flag game or else, it may be time to reassess this early chapter of your working life. Perhaps get a late-entry internship or try a “gap” summer to figure out what you really want to do.
This humor is key, and it helps us buy into the film’s conceit of blending a faithful depiction of the summer camp experience with social commentary that has no seasonal—or life-stage—constraints. People start getting maimed—there’s a gruesome kitchen burn scene that prompts multiple remarks of the “Poor bastard, the pain he must be in, he’d be better off dead” variety—and bumped off quickly, because what did you expect? Elysian Tennyson odes were going to be read in between excerpts from The Compleat Angler and tips for identifying birds? This is horror, after all, but its own secluded variety, just as summer camp itself is a sealed-off enclave—a separate peace (or not).
We have little doubt that meek Angela is doing the dispatching, but that isn’t the film’s big surprise, which comes in its last scene and lives in horror movie infamy. There are those who’d say it’s the most shocking horror film ending of all time, a cool discussion for your work to be a part, but that ending wouldn’t have the effect it does without the parts, passages, and players that get us to that big reveal.
Tony-nominated Mike Kellin, in his final film role (he died in the summer of 1983), is amusing—and all over the place—as camp boss Mel Kostic, who tries to downplay the slayings as unfortunate accidents. This is a man with a horse in the race as per those autopsy reports; better that a kid was a bad swimmer than knocked unconscious and heaved into the pond, looking after the camp’s bottom line. Can’t have fewer campers coming back next year.
In one of the film’s best “what is going on here” bits, a comely counselor asks this 60-something-year-old guy—and remember, that meant you looked like you were in your mid-70s in the 1980s—out on a date at his place and they both treat this like the most normal thing ever, and it’s just how it goes when you’re a cigar stub–chewing silver fox who’s made it to the top of the summer camp game.
Paul DeAngelo plays Ronnie Angelo—which itself elicits a chuckle—a kid on the hot-and-heavy make for Angela. He likes her, but in that “I think maybe you’ll let me penetrate you” manner of a boy that age—or, come to think of it, men of any age—and sees a potential “in.” He’s not exactly creepy and not exactly bad, though he isn’t faithful, but when he cozies up next to Angela on the beach at the lake and does the old “Come on, baby, use that mouth” routine, she has her own “Oh, you want some head, I’ll give you some head, and it’ll be your head—severed” response at the ready.
Then again, summer camp romances aren’t meant to last, save as cherished memories or expired unions that are perhaps called to mind after the latest fight with the wife in the marriage that lingers on but hasn’t worked in forever, and that causes a person to reflect on what life could have been if only so-and-so had been met at such and such a juncture. Then it’s an easy jump from the girl at camp to the temp in the office to the buddy’s wife who always has a commiserating word—after all, you “just vibe”—and so forth. A nostalgia for the evanescent element of life as well as the life that never was.
A further knock on Sleepaway Camp is that it ripped off 1980’s Friday the 13th—it didn’t, at least not that much. Friday the 13th could be classified as a mystery film until its last scene, and said scene can be explained away as a dream, if one wishes to, the same of which can’t be said about the final scene of Sleepaway Camp. But some of the best parts of Friday the 13th are the quietly quotidian. A jar’s lid isn’t screwed on right, and the character takes the time to fix it. This is important because we must feel like we’re in that world ourselves—as if we’re at camp, rather than watching someone else’s away-from-home videos of a bygone summer, or perched in a tree spying on the action down below.
In this regard, Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp share a stretch of dirt out there on the camp baseball diamond. Ricky has a stomachache and takes to his bed, missing out on the night’s social activities, but when he’s well enough to eat later, he has to convince a counselor to let him grab a few snacks from the building that’s shutting down until tomorrow. Believable. A film has establishing shots, but it also has establishing passages that provide a spot for us in that world.
Sleepaway Camp is a film that had a plan and stylistically executed it, pun semi-intended; and as viscerally jolting as the ending of the Jason Voorhees picture was—and consider what a humdinger that coda is in horror film history—the final scene of Sleepaway Camp goes further and doubtlessly changed the whole mood of many a teenage sleepover back in the day. “Um, good night.” “Yeah.” And we’re talking about a movie that has a death-by-vaginal-penetration-with-a-curling-iron sequence that’s a distant second, shock-wise, though technically it could be anal penetration, but let’s move on.
There are gauzy, dreamlike flashbacks that look like something out of French symbolist theater. Sleepaway Camp is adroit at blending the sheen of artifice with the realism—to a degree—of the summer camp experience. The bonds that are forged, the rites of youthful passage, the jockeying for a leg up in the social structure, first sexual experiences.
We’re also treated to lines of dialogue that Marlowe and Shakespeare would have scrapped to take credit for, such as:
“Eat shit and die, Ricky.”
“Eat shit and live, Bill.”
Makes you think.
We’re being jocular here, because that’s in keeping with this aspect of a film that is neither all of this one thing nor all of that other thing. Sleepaway Camp is mottled. The humor is both stylized and true to life. What we think is the pinnacle of wit at age 10 is that which causes us to cringe later—or it should, if we actually grow up, a process that has less to do with our actual age than the quality of our minds. At camp, separate ecosystems nestle up to each other. Youth and growing up, innocence and innocence lost. Innocence clung to and innocence willfully jettisoned.
The film’s tone and balance of contrasting tones parallel these same ideas. Kids are slain, but camp carries on. What? There isn’t going to be volleyball matches with vigilant scorekeeping and safety-flouting archery practice and dedicated movie nights? It’s summer fun as business as usual. Parents don’t arrive in station wagons to spirit their kids away to safety, camp isn’t canceled. There isn’t even much post-murder chatter/speculation between kids or counselors. What happens at camp stays at camp. Camp is camp.
Sleepaway camp is an extension of the sleepover, or the more recent concept of the “sleep-under,” in which Mom or Dad picks up their pajama-clad child before bedtime so that they can repose in their own home. These are important experiences for us. They foster independence, or a harmless—but still constructive—illusion thereof. With independence comes responsibility. There are choices to make. We’re closer to being the boss of us than adults are. That’s the mindset, anyway. Tonight is ours!
The child who goes away to an overnight camp is usually apprehensive. They’re nervous, worried about missing their family, looking forward to when they’ll return. And then what happens after arrival? The child processes their new environment and discovers that others aren’t that different from them. Initial exchanges occur, bonds are quickly forged. These are true friendships that will last for a week, two weeks.
Later, we may think about these past relationships with greater affection than many of the others we have in the years going forward that ended with a slow fizzle, someone becoming increasingly uncommunicative until we just never heard from them again. The end of camp is closure, and closure—as you know when you’ve been denied it—is a very important thing with which to be provided in this life. The camp friendship didn’t get a chance to go “wrong.” It was meant to exist for a moment in time. The song that is two minutes in length has the greater likelihood of being mistake-free than the song that continues for a half hour.
There’s an innocence to the camp friendship, a purity. As Sleepaway Camp rightly understands, it’s a paradoxically scuffed purity. A lot of coming of age can happen at camp. We’re disabused of various notions. Kids tell tall tales, which camp encourages. No one sits around a fire to describe the afternoon their mom took them to the grocery store and they bought ingredients for that week’s taco night. Amid the braggadocio and bullshit—and those rampant urges to interest our peers at all costs—truths filter through. The former heighten the stakes and sharpen the senses; the straight dope is the real payoff, which we’re now better situated to receive.
These are major truths, or it feels that way, about how the world works and what happens as we get older. The big difference between grammar school and middle school. Camp is necessarily very physical; bodies come to the fore. When bodies come to the fore, exploration occurs, even if that’s a private, personal affair. Counselors are the parental figures who can also be a version of our friends. They’re not our older siblings who must tolerate us, as per parental dictates, or else suffer the consequences (being made to go to bed earlier, for example). Counselors are closer to Peter Pan than Wendy. They may eventually become Wendy—but it feels for the duration of their summer job that there’s a world they don’t want to leave behind, which they’re not fully a part of anymore, despite that world being unable to run as it does without them, and, as such, they’re some of the first adult figures with whom we’re closer to being on equal footing.
Our social system is expanding at camp, though it will also be curtailed when Mom and Dad arrive to tote us back home. Promises are made to stay in touch, but practically speaking, summer camp ends with a series of lies for almost all involved. We’re not going to know these people anymore, save for how they—and our experiences with them—have touched us. And as apprehensive as we were to head off for summer camp in the first place, those days after may have a postpartum aspect of sadness—even depression—to them. We’re blue for a period following. Ah, but then there’s school again, the leaves change, and so do we once more, whether we know it or not—probably not. Camp played its part.
No horror film depicts these feelings and ideas so well as Sleepaway Camp. Horror films themselves are a staple of the summer camp experience. Kids talk about scary movies they’ve seen. Horror films are watched on movie night. Ghost stories are a camp hallmark. Fear is exciting. Someone has a scary story, and someone else tries to best them with theirs. Qualifiers rule; e.g., “I swear to God,” as if the hyperbolic suddenly becomes literal.
For Ricky, sleepaway camp is a haven. He excels in this spot. His dialogue is flecked with mannish conversational parts. He sounds older than he is at times, but not because he’s forcing anything. His “steady” from the summer before is cold to him now, and his “why you doing me this way”–style language could have been lifted from an old blues song sung by a past master. Ricky as Blind Lemon Jefferson. He’ll be okay here, with or without this girl. What the older boys have in size over him, he will make up in scrappiness and brains.
Angela, meanwhile, is in a terror zone, which is also her normal state. The difference is that at home she has her surrogate mother in her face, pretending that all is right—or insisting that everything be right—when everything is anything but. At camp, she’s vegetative, like some fern in a clump off in the woods, and this is a source for mockery, whereas normally that same emotional state isn’t noticed or acknowledged because of someone else’s self-obsession and delusion that everything’s a-okay. Left alone, Angela would leave others alone. But kids are similar to adults in that their motivation is usually about what they desire, not what others need. People want to use Angela to hurt her and thus appear “clever” to their friends; as a surface on which to project their own pain and frustrations, as though that negates either; or as an object for sexual gratification that is akin to experimentation, because these are children, and children don’t know.
There’s an Edenic quality to Sleepaway Camp; a version of the fall from grace, or away from innocence. Ronnie is the nice kid in wolf’s clothing. Most men—including good men—have had summers, or longer, when they were like Ronnie. They understood what to say—or tried to figure it out—to get someone else to grant them access to their body. That was the endgame, along with release. Which is far afield from intimate personal connection. Bonding of a different sort.
When he cheats on Angela, if we’re going to call it that, he does so in a clearing in the woods—in other words, not the full-on woods but the woods in miniature—with a kiss. Yet the experience for this horny boy isn’t the same as those he wishes to have with the “girl who got away,” who was never “his” to begin with. Angela wasn’t seen or heard; she was simply there as far as Ronnie was concerned, present and within reach. Silence—or not bothering to find out, as in listen, observe, and learn—was taken for agreement, a form of signing off, the provision of a blank check, which is what Adam and Eve—but probably more Adam than Eve—thought they were getting as the tail end of the snake’s would-be bargain. But there’s no getting back to Eden once you’ve listened to the serpent and gone and done what it led you to do to yourself.
With its approaches to gender—because Angela is not what or who everyone assumes she is—it would be of little surprise to learn that Sleepaway Camp has made inroads into higher education. You could creditably maintain that it’s a trans horror film. Angela is without shame in the infamous final scene. She stands and is observed because she wants to be observed. Not so much caught, as seen. Being seen is a form of being heard. We’re recognized. Our pain is better understood. Neither presents a solution to whatever we’re going through, but both are crucial to wellness, or simply feeling like we have a chance with whatever it is we seek and crave, and in becoming a little less alone.
To the movie’s credit, the shot doesn’t hit us as gratuitous. And it’s a lingering shot, too—we get an eyeful of what’s what. Sharp focus transitions to soft focus, as though reality was becoming a dream, but remains real all the same; an oneiric transcription of what this child has lived with as someone who has not been seen or heard in a long time, if ever.
Our curious reaction—considering the gruesome evidence of the latest crime just committed—is of relief for them. Or him. Or her. We don’t know exactly. But this person named Angela. The movie is the last thing we expected when we began watching it, probably giddy, not long ago, but so is this character. Summer camp transforms, but it also can reveal. Are there any real transformations without revelations? And what is the final scene of Sleepaway Camp but a revelation? Don’t say you saw it coming, either.
Those who watched the movie at a summertime sleepover were bound to keep thinking about it after the conversations regarding how “crazy” it had ended. You internalize and reflect on Sleepaway Camp. It’s almost impossible for it to fail to stay with you because of the unlikely note of peace—and acceptance—that it sounds. Thus, another summer at camp comes to an end. None of the campers are quite the same as on that day when they were dropped off. And with Sleepaway Camp, the same goes for us as viewers. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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