Sleepaway Camp (1983) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 17

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Hello muddah, hello faddah, we’re gettin’ murdered, at Camp Granada.

Sleepaway Camp has many layers to unpack in this low-budget take on the serial killer at a summer camp format. There’s a lot of gruesome killings, but that’s not the most shocking element. It’s staying power is in its absolutely bonkers ending which today is a little off putting.

Before Viewing

In a trailer that seems to pull from Friday The 13th, Sleepaway Camp looks like another in a long line of slasher films set around a camp. However this could potentially be with younger kids than the counselors of previous films, based on some shots. Someone is going around injuring and killing members of the staff and possibly some of the campers as well. Let’s see what amenities Sleepaway Camp has to offer.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

At Camp Arawak in Fort Edward, New York, John (Dan Tursi) and his two young children, Peter and Angela, are hit by a speedboat. Angela (Felissa Rose), the sole survivor, goes to live with her eccentric and strange Aunt Martha Thomas (Desiree Gould) and her cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). Years later the two children return to Camp Arawak for the summer session, where Angela is very shy and withdrawn.

The camp cook, Artie (Owen Hughes) is a huge pervert and attempts to molest Angela in the storeroom, but Ricky surprises them. Later an unseen “kid” pushes a stepstool Artie is standing on causing him to spill boiling water over his body. While Angela is making enemies with Ricky’s ex-girlfriend, Judy (Karen Fields), and the girls counselor Meg (Katherine Kamhi), Ricky is pissing off the older boys and meeting up with his friend Paul (Christopher Collet).

A number of boys harass Angela, including Kenny (John Dunn) and Billy (Loris Sallahian) but Ricky continually stands up for her. Later both boys are found dead; Kenny having drowned in a canoe accident, and Billy being stung by bees in the boys bathroom. After that attack, most campers go home, but about 25 remain.

Paul becomes attracted to Angela and the two begin spending more time together. He kisses her one evening after a movie and tries to put his hand in her shirt. Angela has a weird flashback seeing her father in bed with another man, and young versions of her and Peter sitting on a bed. Angela rebuffs Paul, and then finds him kissing Judy later. The next day at the lake, Meg–tired of Angela’s quiet contempt–throws the young girl in the water while Judy cheers her on. Ricky helps his cousin out while younger campers throw sand on them.

That knight Meg is stabbed in the shower. Counselor Eddie (Fred Greene) takes a group of six young campers into the woods for a sleep out, but has to drive two of them back to the cabins when they get cold. Camp owner Mel (Mike Kellin) believes that Ricky is behind the killings, protecting his cousin. That evening Judy is killed by a silhouetted figure that smothers her with a pillow and rapes her with a curling iron. When Eddie returns to the camping spot he finds the four kids hacked to death.

Mel finds Ricky in the woods and beats him severely, but the real killer arrives and shoots an arrow through Mel’s neck. Angela has asked Paul to go swimming with her at the lake that night. As the counselors search for the missing kids, Ronnie (Paul DeAngelo) and Susie (Susan Glaze) discover Angela on the beach stroking Paul’s hair. In a flashback, it’s shown that Peter is the one that survived the accident and crazy Aunt Martha made him live as a girl. Angela stands up, dropping Paul’s severed head. She is naked, and bloody, revealing she is a boy, shocking the two counselors.

“If she were any quieter, she’d be dead!” – Meg

Sleepaway Camp starts out much like Friday the 13th, with a tragedy that defines the course of the film and then returns some time later to the same summer camp for the bulk of the picture. However this movie focuses on younger campers instead of primarily on the older teen counselors and has a much creepier vibe about it. But that vide is not necessarily about the horror aspects. The main characters in the film are probably between 13-15 years old, with some of the campers being as young as 8-10. There appears to be a mix of counselors in their late teens to their early 20s, plus the camp staff, and owner Mel, who appears to be at least 60. One of the first scenes at camp is Artie the cook watching the young, young girls run to their cabins and talk about them in a completely sexual way. His comment is basically if they’re too young, you’re too old. Luckily he gets his before too long, after trying to molest Angela in the storeroom, but that’s not the end. Aside from teen on teen harassment (boys to boys, girls to girls, and boys to girls) a small subplot of Meg inviting herself to dinner with Mel in the last act comes off as really creepy. Meg can’t be more than 20, and works for Mel, so inviting her to dinner up at his place at 9:30pm feels very wrong. It doesn’t feel like a film that could be filmed today.

But that’s not why you’re here. You want to know about the actual horror elements of the film, and not the strange subtext of a film from 1983. Well these graphic killings are much stronger than the original Friday the 13th. They of course are all shot in a way to minimize the actual violence, but the after effects of the killings are brutal. Interestingly every shot of a victim has three cutaways and returns to show their mutilation three times. Just some weird pattern that director Robert Hiltzik decided on, presumably. Just a very odd thing I noticed in this viewing. The killings and the carnage get increasingly worse from the scalded face and hands of Artie, to the stabbing of Meg, and finally the killing they could only show with shadows of Judy’s hands reaching for help, he rape by curling iron. If these moments don’t make your toes curl, you’re not paying enough attention. Then there’s the final denouement, with the shocking decapitation of Paul and the big reveal of Angela’s secret. This is probably one of the weirdest and best twists in a slasher film from this era. How do you follow Friday the 13th and its sequels and look-alikes? Obviously by creating a potential fakeout that Ricky is the killer protecting his cousin (though it’s unclear who might fall for that ploy), and then revealing that it’s in fact Angela–just not the Angela the audience thought it was.

Unfortunately, while a great twist, the film does a disservice to the gay and transgender community by equating alternate lifestyles with mental illness. As with Psycho, which had overtones of homosexuality in Norman Bates, along with his cross-dressing killings, Sleepaway Camp takes this to an entirely different level. It appears to be saying that because the aunt raised Peter as Angela, and that she was forced to return to the scene of her biggest trauma, the bullying and attacks by the staff and campers warrants the killings. I’m all for the evilness of insanity of a young woman, but coupled with strange dream–which implies that her father was gay, and was discovered one night by his children–the reveal at the end appears to be an explanation for the events, rather than an additional factor. The transphobia is palpable. There is an additional interpretation that the film is a coming of age metaphor where the attacks are a wish fulfillment for Angela to cope with the bullying and unwanted sexual advances. However that doesn’t track as clearly.

Sleepaway Camp still stands out amongst its peers in the ranks of 80s slasher films due to its shocking acts and twist ending. It created a small franchise of direct-to-video sequels focusing on the return of Angela to various other camps. It’s a film that is very much of the time in which it was made, trying to capture the angst and anxiety of teen on teen interactions, which includes a lot of cursing and bullying. Unfortunately it doesn’t deal with those issues, only presenting them as the background for the story of a serial killer on the loose. It is definitely one of the more graphic films seen so far this season on 31 Days of Horror, especially given the age of the film. Stay tuned for tales from the dark side with at least one or two more slasher films before the month is over.

Assorted Musings

• The film is followed by three sequels, Sleepaway Camp II and Sleepaway Camp III which has a new actress playing Angela, and Return to Sleepaway Camp with Felissa Rose returning to the role that she’s famous for.
• If you are really good at paying attention at the start of the film, you will notice that Peter is the sole survivor in the water, which makes the following scene confusing when they show Angela as the survivor years later. Maybe it’s just a low budget mistake!