I spent 11 summers at sleepaway camp, first as a camper and then, once I turned 17, as a counselor. Every year around this time, I get nostalgic for the days that moved along to the soundtrack of 2000s pop and Dean Friedman songs, and the freedom of a world where the greatest authority is some guy in his early 30s named Neil whom everyone ignored. I have found only one solution to assuage my yearning for the blue skies and green hills of the Finger Lakes: watching movies where a bunch of teens living in cabins get absolutely slaughtered.
From Friday the 13th to watching the trailer for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on a loop until it's reached feature length—every era, every iteration, every final girl—I've seen probably every summer camp slasher at this point. I've seen Bruce Springsteen's little sister drown a girl in an outhouse (Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers). I've seen Sadie Sink get hacked up by an axe and then, in a miraculous testament to the powers of first-aid training, be resurrected through CPR (Fear Street Part Two: 1978). I’ve seen George Costanza as a horny teenager (The Burning), which was perhaps the most horrifying moment of them all.
I have lived a million of those classic, less harrowing slasher moments as well. I've smoked a joint in the woods before walking alone in the dark, climbed through an overgrown trail after midnight to a part of the camp that hadn't been used in decades, and been briefly stranded at night in the middle of a rural New York town after my friend's car broke down. I bought a picture of a random man at an antique store, to trick my campers into thinking he was a local ghost. I had a habit of sneaking out of my own tent to spend the night with my boyfriend, and sneaking back in the morning. Such is the beauty of summer camp: mix the freedom of self-discovery with the perils of minimal supervision. Put a bunch of horny teenagers in charge. Throw in a ghost story around a campfire, and you've got yourself a horror movie.
Sex. Death. More sex. More death. Final girl. Suggestion that it's not really over so the studios can run the story dry with 23 sequels, a miniseries, and seven different video games. Roll credits.
Friday the 13th, released in the summer of 1980, was the hit that launched the summer camp slasher genre. It introduced the now-classic horror movie villain Jason Voorhees (although his iconic hockey mask came on later in the franchise), a child who was bullied and drowned at Camp Crystal Lake while his counselors were off having sex. However, in the original, Jason is thought to be dead, and his mother is the one killing the counselors who have been preparing to reopen Camp Crystal Lake 22 years later. In the process, Kevin Bacon gets stabbed in the throat, the villain gets beheaded, and the movie introduces perhaps the most perfect horror soundtrack in existence. It rocks.
But for all its gory fun, I've always found it to be the most soulless of the crop. Screenwriter Victor Miller shamelessly stripped the slasher formula to its bare bones, and director Sean S. Cunningham was singularly focused on making a box-office hit to the detriment of most factors that would make it particularly interesting. The concept of a mother seeking vengeance for her son in some kind of reverse Psycho dynamic is compelling but never truly explored. The movie is devoid of the campiness (in the Susan Sontag sense) that makes low-budget horror of the 1980s so exciting to watch. Where are the song breaks or montages? Where is the over-the-top accent? Where are the unexpected explorations of what it means to grow up couched between absurdist murders? Give me something! Anything!
In later installments, when Jason takes over as the killer, the franchise moves further and further away from its origins, quite literally. Jason takes Manhattan (Muppet crossover when?), and flies up to space, and then—well, who even knows where he is at this point. Summer camp is left behind, but even when it is the setting of the franchise, the camp is never a distinct location, just a plot device to ensure a bunch of sexually charged young people are isolated from the outside world.
The so-called copycats of Friday the 13th that came out in the years following are more interesting, more full of heart, and more campy in both senses of the word. Even if they use the same formula, these movies turn the summer camp slasher from just an equation of sex + death = money to a vivid world that engages with the fears of growing up and the sometimes ugly dynamics of an environment where the idiocy of youth reigns. Summer camp hijinks—like softball games and prank wars—make the world of a film feel lived in, and inspire lines that you could only hear from rambunctious preteens who are unfortunately aware that they’re hilarious (including this amazing exchange from Sleepaway Camp). They prove that summer camp slashers are best when gratuitous violence exists beside gratuitous shenanigans.
One of my favorites of this era is the 1983 movie Sleepaway Camp. It succeeds in depicting both the carefree spirit of summer camp, and the isolating and terrifying feeling of being an outsider at an age when children can be at their most judgmental and insecure. The movie focuses on Angela's first summer going to Camp Arawak with her cousin Ricky. Angela has been living with her cousin since she was five, after her twin brother, father, and father's boyfriend were killed in a boating accident. In the present, she enters a land of peer pressure, preteen hormones, and sometimes vicious femininity. Refusing to talk or participate in activities, she is bullied relentlessly by both the other campers and the occasional counselor. At the same time, she begins to fall in love with her cousin's friend, Paul. When Angela's bullies start getting murdered one by one, everyone suspects her cousin is the one doing the killing. All of these pieces lead up to a dramatic twist at the end.
Camp Arawak is a hotbed of teenage hormones. The sex part of the sex and death formula is there in its muted and awkward preteen form, but not as a precursor to the killing. Instead, we see summer camp as a place for self-exploration as girls and boys go through the horrible rite of passage that is experiencing sexual attraction for the first time and not really knowing what to do about it. Everything is heightened by the intense scrutiny of the camp's small community. Angela sits on the edge of all of this, awkward, quiet, and with fear in her eyes. First, she is bullied for not having a boyfriend, then bullied for her budding relationship with Paul. When the murders begin, the killing heightens the stakes of Angela's outsider status, making the tension unbearable. Finally, a team of counselors and police officers find Angela naked on the beach holding Paul's decapitated head. We learn that Angela's twin brother did not die, but was raised as a girl by her aunt. She has been doing the killings all along.
A lot has been written about the transphobia and complexities of this revelation. The movie does, unquestionably, further a narrative of dangerous gender deviants. At the same time, I sympathize with Angela, even after she is revealed as the murderer. The final image of the movie is meant to horrify viewers by putting Angela's screaming face on the naked body of a man (which is legitimately how they filmed it), but what haunted me long after the movie ended was the terror on Angela’s face as she screams out in this moment. These aren't the menacing screams of a vicious and dangerous killer. She is so clearly lost, traumatized, and in need of help and care. The scariest part of Sleepaway Camp is not the murders or the murderer, but the terror of being a child who does not fit in, has never known how, and is not supported in doing so.
The fear and confusion of adolescence still fuels modern summer camp slashers, although at this point the reference is often shifted from a familiarity with summer camp to a familiarity with the summer camp slasher genre itself. The Final Girls (2015) stands out precisely for its meta-humor and use of the horror genre to explore mourning and mother-daughter bonds. The Final Girls focuses on the relationship between the teenage Max and her late mother, who starred in a Friday the 13th-esque cult classic horror movie called Camp Bloodbath. After a fire breaks out during a special anniversary screening of Camp Bloodbath, Max and her friends are trapped inside the movie and have to find their way out. Just like the characters of Camp Bloodbath, the teens have to escape the wrath of the Jason Voorhees stand-in, Billy, but Max is also trying to save Nancy, her mother’s character in the movie.
The Final Girls takes every classic plot point of the summer camp slasher, lays it bare for the audience, then laughs in its face. In order to save the characters from summoning the attention of Billy, Max and her friends have to go around and stop them from having sex, which turns out to be a near-impossible feat. The title itself is a reference to the classic horror movie trope, which Max and her friends are also aware of, as they realize the only way to end the terror is for someone to be the final girl. After some discussion, they realize it must be Max, who is the only girl among them with her virginity intact. After the Camp Bloodbath credits role, Max wakes up next to her friends in a hospital bed, until Billy arrives to reveal that they are in Camp Bloodbath 2: Cruel Summer. Sex. Death. Final girl. Opportunity for sequels.
These references are not meaningless fodder for jokes, but a jumping-off point to explore the real heart of the movie, which is Max's relationship with her mother. Writing The Final Girls was a way for screenwriter Joshua John Miller to explore and deal with the grief he felt losing his father Jason Miller, who had played Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist. This understanding of the specific experience of seeing a loved one live on in a movie where they are condemned to death is part of what gives The Final Girls such emotional depth. I cried as Max, wounded and bleeding, accepts that she cannot save her mother and lets Nancy sacrifice herself. Then I laughed with tears in my eyes, as Nancy stripped to "Bette Davis Eyes" to summon Billy. This sounds like emotional whiplash, but the beauty of The Final Girls is that it builds a world in which this tonal shift feels so subtle. All of this is due to the movie’s deep understanding and appreciation of the genre. Sleepaway Camp's poignancy was possible by the film's investment in the emotional setting of summer camp. In a similar way, The Final Girls' investment in the genre allows the depth of the relationships and the meta-humor to exist side by side.
This summer promises to be another big one for the summer camp slasher, as Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is set to release in August. Much like The Final Girls, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma seems to be a referential take on the genre. The title certainly suggests an exploration of the two key components of any summer camp slasher. Who knows if the trope will be successful, but I, for one, will be seated.
