Excerpt from piece on 1983's totally high quality Sleepaway Camp

Friday 5/16/25

This will be in Nightmares Be Damned: Writings About Horror Films Worth Staying Up For.

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Angela gets bullied by the other kids at the camp. We have the sense that many of these kids have gone from one bad environment to another. Ricky is Angela's protector, but you can’t be everywhere all the time, 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 to view it as satire, and perhaps it was satire at that. The acting is so bad in spots that it seems intentional. You might argue that director/writer Robert Hiltzik has given us a highly stylized picture that’s—gulp—loosely art house-y.

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 this camp. If you’re twenty-five 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.

People start getting maimed—there’s a gruesome kitchen burn scene that prompts several remarks of the “Poor bastard, the pain he must be in, he’d be better off dead” variety—and then bumped off, because what did you think expect? Elysian Tennyson odes were going to be read in between excerpts from The Compleat Angler and tips for identifying birds?

We have little doubt that meek Angela is doing the dispatching, but that’s not the film’s big surprise/reveal, which comes in its last scene and lives in horror film infamy and no doubt many people’s personal nightmare repositories that you may or may not like to think of as being overseen by the Heat Miser or some other fictional character from childhood. There are those who’d say it’s the most shocking horror film ending of all-time, which is a cool discussion for your work in which to feature.

A knock on Sleepaway Camp is that it ripped off Friday the 13th—it didn’t, at least not that much; this a film that had a plan and stylistically executed it, pun semi-intended—and as viscerally surprising as the ending of the Jason picture was, that final scene of Sleepaway Camp doubtlessly changed the whole vibe of many a teenage sleepover back in the day. “Um, goodnight.” “Yeah.” And we’re talking 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 keep moving.

There are gauzy, dream-like flashback sequences 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.

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 come to spirit their kids away to safety, camp isn’t cancelled. There isn’t even much post-murder chatter/speculation between kids or counselors. What happens at camp stays at camp.

Mike Kellin 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 sixty-something-year-old guy—and remember, that meant you looked like you were in your mid-seventies 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—seriously—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" (stop). He’s not exactly creepy, and not exactly bad—though he does cheat—but when he nestles up to Angela on the beach at the lake and does the old “Come on baby, use that mouth” routine, she essentially responds with this whole “Oh, you want some head, I’ll give you some head, and it’ll be your head—severed” deal.