Cousins Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) and Angela (Felissa Rose) are dropped off at Camp Arawak for the summer.
Ricky has attended the camp before, but Angela is a newbie, and finds herself ostracised.
While tensions rise between the cousins and the other campers, the staff’s attention is focused on keeping the camp running.
And then someone dies…
Sleepaway Camp is one of those movies that I had been aware of decades.
I think being aware of the twist stopped me from watching it - what else did this movie have to offer me?
Plenty, it turns out.
I have seen some criticism of the cast’s Long Island accents, but I enjoyed the sense of specificity. Specificity, or maybe, singularity, is the operative word.
It might have something to do with the context.
Released in 1983, Sleepaway Camp is a late addition to the first wave of slashers. Clearly modelled after Friday the 13th, the film plays like an auteur-ist take on the genre - taking the familiar tropes and pushing them into strange, new territory that forces you to consider them anew.
There is something so hard to pin down about the tone.
The film oscillates on an almost scene-by-scene basis (sometimes shot-by-shot) between glaring theatricality (the mother’s asides to herself, Mel’s monologues) and disarming realism (the way the kids interact feels like the filmmakers let them come up with their own dialogue).
Some people would see this as bad filmmaking, but it gives the movie a unique flavour. This is a movie I hope I can see in a theatre one day just so I can gauge an audience’s reaction.
After bingeing so many slashers in the last couple of years, Sleepaway Camp is fascinating.
While it was clearly intended as a super-commercial enterprise, it seems to work against the tropes: Instead of horny teens lusting after each other, we get a pedophile openly lusting at children. The deaths are all bizarre - death by boiling, bee stings and curling iron. And the film’s casting - mostly real adolescents - increases the sense of danger.
Unlike the Friday the 13th movies, which are based around horny twenty-somethings in a mostly empty camp, this story takes place in an active summer camp.
And the film seems determined to make this environment as threatening as possible. Not only does Angela have to avoid the danger from the camp’s open sex offender, she also has to deal with the attentions of other boys, and the animosity of the girls.
The latter is the most overt flip on a familiar convention: the characters who seem to be powered by libido are the girls: Judy is openly horny, running through the camp’s roster of potential partners with relish, while Meg has her eye on the ancient camp owner, Mel. Meanwhile, both girls despise Angela for a presumed lack of puberty.
The final reveal that Angela is a boy, forced to live as a girl by her aunt, feels like the most explicit version of an intriguing theme that I have noticed in other slashers.
This might be the influence of Psycho, but multiple slasher villains of this era are revealed to be performing multiple gender roles: Terror Train and Night School spring to mind. Even with the original Friday the 13th, it could be argued the film is presenting the killer as a man.
While intended as a shock reveal - offensive in its own right - the ending feels of a piece with the film’s desire to disrupt the viewer’s assumptions about everything they are watching.
What I take away from Sleepaway Camp is a sense of excitement. While I doubt the filmmakers were fully aware of how the film would turn out, the final film feels like the ultimate example of the strange alchemy of filmmaking. In this film, and its reworking of a nascent genre, I see the seeds for new inspiration. Rather than following a formula, or being weighed down by conventions, the world Sleepaway Camp creates seems to be beholden to nothing. Genre here is merely a launching pad, a source of inspiration rather than a checklist to be adhered to.
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