Slasher Summer Entry #1: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

“Eat shit and die, Ricky.”

“Eat shit and live, Bill.”

A dizzying cocktail of 80s camp — too-cropped crop tops, over-the-top bullies, general teenage sleaze and some truly bizarre acting choices — Sleepaway Camp is a sweaty, surreal experience. Riffing on the success of Friday the 13th (1980), the flick is but one of myriad summer camp slashers, albeit markedly audacious in execution and famous twist ending. Directed by Robert Hiltzik, the film has accumulated equal cult status and controversy.

(Spoilers ahead, beware.)

Sleepaway Camp opens with an unfortunate boating incident on the lake. Our protagonist Angela is the sole survivor, traumatised by the ostensible death of her brother Peter, as well as her father. Years later, a now mostly mute, sheepish Angela is sent to Camp Arawak with her cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten), under the care of her Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould). Gould’s performance is truly singular. A coked-up Coraline’s Other Mother. She brings an uncanny mania to the role, bordering on Mary Poppins levels of theatre. Every bit of line delivery will make you furrow your eyebrows in confusion. It’s weird and awesome. Her outfit is nuts.

This woman is seriously disturbed and sets the tone for the full thing. Notably, Aunt Martha, (the crazy bitch), is a doctor. And she’s really antsy about the kid’s physicals. Hm.

Camp Arawak is not so kind to the Carrie White-esque Angela. The teens are giddily cruel, in a very specific 1980s way that still feels grounded — likely due to the use of real child actors. No 24-year-olds as 15-year-olds in this movie, nope. Alpha Bitch Judy (Karen Fields), Angela’s main aggressor, maintains the same ‘I’m-Hot-and-Evil-Fuck-You’ proto-Disney Channel villain tone throughout. It’s remarkable. While much of the amateurish child acting occasionally verges on stale and mawkish, it’s just so much fun. Did we need to spend five minutes watching these boys play baseball? No, not at all. But it’s very real, earnest even: which makes all the attempted child molestation, slashing and general moral transgression all the darker.

Soon enough, Angela’s bullies start dying off one by one. The film really wants you to think it’s Ricky protecting his cousin (God bless), but the climax confirms the killer to be none other than Angela herself. Who, by the way, is Peter — as revealed by a very naked, mildly horrifying, prolonged shot at the end, subsided by a long, painful, animalistic groan. Turns out, nutty Aunt Martha forced the kid to live as a girl.

“My god, she’s a boy!”

Nooo, girl penis. For all its ridiculousness, as the camera lingers on Angela and her exposed genitalia, the film drags us into darker territory. Yeah, it’s hard to begrudge the critics. A thread of transphobia and homophobia runs through Sleepaway Camp. On top of being traumatised by her aunt’s hijinks, poor Angela is also corrupted at a young age by witnessing her father engage in homosexual sex, as revealed by a lurid and strange dreamlike sequence. Released at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, the film is sort of inextricable from its social and historical context: the fear of sexual degeneration stalks its core themes, and it’s not a very flattering picture.

It’s fair that this film is divisive. You can’t fault anyone for not being on board. Can you blame them for loving it though? Art, even at its most garish and offensive, provokes and confers new meaning. The movie, while just about as politically incorrect as they come, features a shy, socially isolated lead who is forced to live a role incongruous with her true identity. Her killing spree is cathartic. Of course a bunch of queer people would lap that shit up. Besides, any flick with that many guys in skimpier clothes than the girls has to have something weird and homoerotic going on.

Two things can be true: Sleepaway Camp is transphobic/homophobic, and Sleepaway Camp is for the queers. I much prefer the reparative camp. Yes, the Thing is Bad. So? What do we get from it? Other than probably the tiniest booty shorts ever seen on a man.

I have no interest in defending the film. That would be boring. It’s uncomfortable - hauntingly, resonantly so. It doesn’t need to be clean to be worth examining. It’s not safe, or palatable, and maybe that’s the point.