Trans horror

Monday 5/26/25

What a lot of variegated work I've been doing on so many different pieces over the past several days. I took that 1000 word piece I'd written on Sleepaway Camp and turned it this morning into a 2800 word essay. This will be in Nightmares Be Damned: Writings About Horror Films Worth Staying Up For. Dynamic writing in this excerpt.

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Sleepaway camp is an extension on the sleepover, or, in more modern times, the “sleepunder”—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.

The child who goes away to an overnight camp for the first time is usually apprehensive. They’re nervous, worried about missing their family, looking forward to when they’ll return. There are plenty of home environments which are anything save bastions of safety, but let’s hope that’s not the norm. And then what happens after arrival? The child processes their new environment, discovers that others feel as they do. Initial exchanges occur, and bonds are quickly forged.

These are true friendships which 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, or 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 milk and bread and ingredients for that week’s taco night. Amidst the braggadocio and bullshit—and those rampant urges to interest 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, 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). Our social system is expanding, though it will also be curtailed when mom and dad show up to tote us back home. Promises are made to stay in touch, though practically speaking, summer camp ends with a series of lies for almost all involved. We’re not going to know these people anymore, but 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.

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. Ghosts stories are a camp hallmark. Fear is exciting. Someone has a scary story and someone else tries to one up them. Qualifiers rule; as in, “I swear to God,” as if the hyperbolic all of a sudden becomes literal.

For Ricky, sleepaway camp is a haven. He excels here. 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. Left alone, she would leave others alone. But kids are similar to adults in that they usually desire something for themselves and that’s the motivation. 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 which 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—with a kiss, but 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”—in the sexually consensual and agreed-upon relationship senses—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 some inroads into higher education. You could argue that it’s a trans horror film. Angela is without shame in the infamous final scene. She stands and is seen because she wants to be seen. 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.