Sleepaway Camp (

1983

)

Friday the 13th (1980) gave aspiring filmmakers a template from which they could craft not just successful low-budget movies but outright hits. All you needed was a few aspiring actresses who weren't opposed to taking off their clothes, a couple of square acres of woods to film in, a campground that's out of use for the season, and a talented special effects artist to produce the gore. Hell, the story practically writes itself. Few of the rip-offs were willing to tinker much with the formula, after all, if Friday the 13th (1980) and its sequels were printing money, so obviously, there was an audience demand for effectively the same movie released again and again. Why risk a potential windfall by shaking things up? Certainly, that was the logic behind such competent if creatively bankrupt films as The Burning (1981). First-time writer/director Robert Hiltzik was, as far as I know, the first filmmaker to attempt something more complicated with the Summer Camp Massacre sub-genre. Sure, his particular innovation could hardly be considered original, being lifted wholesale from decades-old horror movies like Psycho (1960) and Homicidal (1961), but in such a risk-averse climate even this tepid degree of creativity counts for a lot.

We open sometime in the recent past, with a man taking his two kids, Peter and Angela, out for a boating trip. Some local teens playing around in a speedboat cause a horrific accident that leaves the man and one of his children dead. The survivor is taken in by the man's sister, Dr. Thomas, a recent divorce who raises the child alongside her own son Ricky. I hesitate to put spoiler warnings here, because even I with my brain irreparably damaged by hundreds of hours of cheesy movies and video games, was able to guess the twist almost immediately. We're told that Angela was the survivor and naturally are supposed to assume that Peter was killed in the accident. The only problem is that the woman playing Dr. Thomas is so obviously insane that anyone who is paying any attention to the first five to ten minutes of the film will immediately assume that she's up to something sinister. She talks like she's a community theater actress whose got once chance to impress a big-shot Hollywood director and is hamming up her every utterance to do so. The kids and most of the other characters in the movie are performing in a much more naturalistic fashion, coming across as regular people, which only makes her absurd performance stand out all the more shapely. When she's handing the kids her specially prepared physical examination reports I'd already seen enough to guess that Angela was really Peter being forced to live as a girl by his crazy adoptive mother. Maybe I just watch too many of these damn things, but for me, nothing was shocking or even surprising about the film's infamous twist ending. Though I'll confess to a certain base pleasure of watching the characters run around trying to unravel a mystery I'd already guessed at before the first murder took place.

Anyway, for reasons that are impossible to grasp by those of us with fully-balanced brain chemistry, Dr. Thomas has decided to send both Ricky and Angela away to Camp Arawak, an overnight camp situated on a lake somewhere in the woods. This is a startling foolish decision on her part because overnight camp means communal living and the subsequent loss of all privacy for Angela. Naturally, I assume that Angela is in no hurry to let others know his secret, but between the communal showers, dressing rooms, and daily trips to the lake for swimming, he's going to be hard-pressed to keep it concealed from the other girls. His best bet to avoid notice is to quietly keep his head down and keep a low profile, but unfortunately, Angela's shyness makes him the object of suspicion and ridicule not only by the resident mean girl Judy but also from his counselor, Meg. Add to this the fact that all the considerable trauma that Angela has suffered has rendered him so timid that he's practically mute with everyone at the camp aside from Ricky. How Dr. Thomas thought this could result in anything aside from trauma and disaster is beyond me.

There are worse things at Camp Arawak than bitchy campers like Judy though, most troubling is the grotesquely obese cook Artie who spends an inordinate amount of time ogling the young female campers. One can only assume that real-world pedophiles are a little bit more circumspect about their paraphilia than this guy, who openly boasts to his co-workers about his desire to rape the prepubescent campers as they get off the bus. I can barely summon up hatred for Artie, disgusting as he is because I'm so miffed that his co-worked just shake off his sick desires as little more than light banter. What is wrong with you people? In short order, Artie gets Angela alone, but before he can do anything he's interrupted by Ricky who catches the fat slob with his pants down (sadly the expression is literal in this case). Artie zips up and threatens Ricky and Angela into silence, lest they face his full wrath, then throws them out of the storeroom. Shortly thereafter though, an unseen assailant ambushes Artie while he's boiling a massive pot of water for the camp's daily corn-on-the-cob ration, knocking the entire pot onto his head. I can't say I was overly worried watching the fat bastard scream in agony and draw his last breath, though I was probably more moved than the camp's administrator Mel by the cook's death. Mel is mostly just worried about bad publicity and is quick to bride the kitchen staff into silence less word of this leak to the campers or worse yet their easily panicked parents. There's no reason to assume that this is anything other than a freak accident, or so he tells himself.

It's not all pedophiles and murder though at Camp Arawak though, there's plenty of time for youthful romance between the occasional moment of horror. Ricky makes a play for Judy, the girl he dated last Summer only to find that her growth spurt has convinced her that she's too good for him. Even Angela, shy and (seemingly) underdeveloped as she is finds herself entangled in a flirtation with Ricky's friend, Paul. Paul is hopelessly out of his depth in this situation, being inexperienced himself and pursuing a love interest with a complicated life-experience, to say the least. Paul is expecting the sort of girl that will gladly (or at least coyly) agree to some moonlit make-out sessions, maybe even a bit more. He's a regular guy with regular desires, a bit clumsy in the way he expresses him and more than a little prone toward doing something stupid. I'm sure that few among us could boast of never having been like Paul in one way or another. Angela though is on a whole different wavelength, he's starved for male friendship, and even if he's interested in Paul romantically (which is not a given considering all the complexities of Angela's situation) going too far with Paul will compromise his secret. This is a recipe for disaster even under the best circumstances, and the two would-be lovers have to contend with some outside influences as well in the form of Judy. She is miffed that any boy is giving Angela attention, even if that boy is someone she wouldn't so much as give the time of day to under normal circumstances. It's easy for Judy to drive a wedge between Angela and Paul, and this more than anything else is what drives Angela really off the deep end.

All the while more and more campers are turning up dead, and invariable its the campers or counselors who draw the ire of Ricky or Angela in some form or another. Even if you haven't managed to guess the conclusion to the film already, chances are you can see where this is going. While the gore effects are nowhere near close to the top level of the genre at the time, each murder in the film is handled with an unusual amount of care and creativity. Nobody is just killed outright, at least until the bodies start to pile up during the film's climax. Instead, they are burned to death with boiling water, locked in a bathroom stall and fed to the bees, or stabbed in the shower through the divider wall. There is an element of prudishness to the murders themselves that echos earlier, less explicitly gory slashers like Halloween (1978) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), in that we are shown almost none of the blood and gore of the murders themselves. Instead, we see the grisly remains of the murders, often in long slow pans that give the viewer ample time to drink in the grotesque details. Here the special effects shine too, the mortal remains of the campers and counselors are rendered in grotesque detail. For my money, this is more effective than all but the most sensational of murders from Friday the 13th (1980) or The Burning (1981) because each individual murder is so striking and so unique that it is burned into my memory.

I have seen certain criticism and summaries that describe Angela as transsexual, which seems strange to me because this is obviously not the case. Transsexual people are people whose gender identity does not match their biological sex. Angela, however, did not choose to live as a girl, this decision was made for him by his adoptive mother, and Angela, as far as we know (he doesn't talk much), still identifies as a boy. It would be like claiming David Reimer was transsexual because his parents raised him as a girl, on the advice of Dr. John Money, after he was castrated in a freak circumcision accident. Despite his unusual upbringing, David Reimer still identified as a man and was understandably outraged when he found out the deception that his parents and their quack psychologist had perpetrated on him. There's no reason to suspect that Angela does not feel the same way, particularly since he spent his entire youth, up to the accident, living as a boy. Thus the arguments of critics like Willow Maclay fall apart under the slightest scrutiny because Angela is not a “woman with a penis” as she mistakenly argues but rather a boy made to live as a girl. That's not to say that the film has nothing to say about gender roles, because Angela is placed into the circumstances of many transsexual people as they come of age, and is expected to conform to a gender identity that doesn't reflect who he really is. Such a situation can and does cause madness, usually self-destructive (see the aforementioned David Reimer who committed suicide) but here, because it is a horror movie, it takes the form of homicidal impulses. Angela is not a monster because of who he is (were circumstances different there's no reason to expect that Angela would have been anything other than a normal boy), but because of the inhuman system, he's been forced to live under. The audience is made to sympathize with Angela, all his murders are at least partially justified, and when the full extent of his plight is made apparent we cannot help but feel for him. The framing of Angela's situation is that of a cis person made to live under the same conditions as a trans person.

Interestingly, the film goes out of its way to show us the kind of nurturing male environment which Angela has been unjustly excluded from in the form of Ricky and his friends. What else could be the reason behind the extensive scenes in which Ricky and his bunk-mates play baseball or clown around in their cabin? The asides are too long and too detailed to be unintentional, and far too lovingly crafted to be mere filler meant to pad out the movie to feature-length. Moreover, it's an unusually positive and realistic depiction of how boys interact with one another when there are no girls or women around, especially to modern eyes accustomed to constant lectures that interpret masculinity in any form as “toxic”. There are practical jokes, plenty of teasing, and more than a little mischief but everything is depicted as being all in good fun. The boys get heated at times and even come to blows at one point, but when the fight ends all is instantly forgiven and the two boys even stick up for each other to the counselor who breaks up the squabble. It captures a lot of truth about male friendships and lays it out for the audience with astonishing frankness. It's a far cry from the catty, mean girls world of the girl's bunks where every remark is laced with a casual cruelty that the boys seldom display even for their most hated enemies. Girls, presumably, can manage this environment well enough, and even thrive therein, but boys like Angela are hopelessly out of their depth.