If you’re subscribed to Shudder and love 80s gore, you’re in luck, because they just added one of the most memorable slasher series to their collection: Sleepaway Camp. As kids frolic and find romance at summer camp, a killer is on the loose preying on those who stray from their morals or make camp a bad experience for others. I’d like to say that the camp vibes in these films is even more well known than at other camp-centered horror flicks. In all entries to the series, the camping experience isn’t lost to the murder, ensuring viewers get a dose of nostalgic realness that only Sleepaway Camp can give. While the first film will always take the top prize, we’ll go through all movies, reviewing their best and worst traits and how the series impacted horror cinema. Warning: contains spoilers!
Sleepaway Camp (1983)
Sleepaway Camp has one of the best twist endings of all time. The pride of the series, we follow Angela and her cousin Ricky to Camp Arawak, where Ricky is a returning camp champ and Angela is the new, introverted weirdo. This doesn’t sit well with other campers, and Angela is relentlessly bullied before learning to find love and enjoy her time there. Unfortunately for the bad apples, someone is going around killing people — children and counselors. We’re now faced with a sort of whodunit, a race against time to find the killer before everyone ends up slaughtered.
Sleepaway Camp was extremely ahead of its time, featuring a huge plot point in that Angela is 1) the killer, 2) transgender, and 3) (alleged in a flashback) forced to change sex/gender as a child. While I’m certainly not an expert in LGBTQ+ studies or their appearances in film, I often see this movie named specifically in articles and analyses about identity in horror (see Willow Maclay’s cléo article or BJ Colangelo in Dread Central).
Prominent focus on (then-taboo) topics like gender, pedophilia, and gay relationships is, quite honestly, added only for shock value. It worked, and at the expense of being extremely problematic in 2020s terms, Sleepaway Camp was elevated from hokey Friday the 13th rip-off to a distinguished cult classic.
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)
With such a strong contender in the first movie, it was a given that we would get a sequel. Angela returns as a counselor to the new and improved Camp Rolling Hills (formerly the ill-fated Camp Arawak). Angela is just as spunky as ever and loves her job, much to the dismay of rowdy teens at the camp. There’s more sex, more nudity, more drugs and more mayhem as Angela goes on the prowl for misbehaving campers once again.
At this point we immediately know who the killer is, so no guessing here. There’s also not such a big deal concerning sex/gender as in the original, which is probably a good thing because we already know the stories. We do hear the campers telling rumors about her sex change and murder spree, but Unhappy Campers chooses to spend its time lingering on issues of morality and the consequences of the teens’ actions.
Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989)
Unfortunately, not all sequels are equal. In our third summer at what is now Camp New Horizons, we basically get a retelling of the previous year’s murders. Framed around a social experiment to pair groups of privileged and underprivileged youths together and create lasting friendships and bonding, Angela returns disguised as one of the youths and starts her murder spree again. It’s not hard to find kids worthy of death when half of them are snotty, spoiled rich kids and the other half are on drugs, in the criminal system, or both.
Teenage Wasteland still gives us the kill count we crave, keeping up with the inventive torture Angela knows and loves. But the story at this point is getting stale and feels slower than the previous two, and in my opinion it’s not really necessary viewing. We’ve strayed far from the original shock and awe and are now in a third installment that feels more like the 11th.
Return to Sleepaway Camp (2008)
And here things get a little spicy; Return to Sleepaway Camp is technically the fourth installment of the series, but canonically a direct sequel to the first 1983 film. Fan favorites from the original come back to Camp Manabe to once again battle a murdering psychopath. Nothing new for the campers and counselors: mean-spirited pranks, bullies, sex, the whole shebang. What we do get though is a pretty good Red Herring in who the killer actually is… as well as another twist ending.
Return to Sleepaway Camp, made decades after the original, understandably doesn’t feel like it really belongs in the series. The filmmakers did a great job in everything from story to effects/kills and even getting some returning faces to the screen, but we’re missing that camp feeling we got from the original. Yes, it takes place at a camp, but I think in today’s time, camping is just a different experience than it was in the 80s. Don’t let that dissuade you from watching it though, as Return is still a fun watch.
The Sleepaway Camp series is one of my favorite slashers, and I will never pass up an opportunity to watch it — especially not the first one. Not only is it an awfully entertaining story, it’s wrapped up tight in social issues from sex to substance abuse and psychology. Sleepaway Camp has the unique ability to be used as an example in many different scenarios, and for good reason. So if you’re in the neighborhood of wanting a ride through slasher town — but also don’t have the time for a 20-part series — let it take you back to a simpler time of camp and gore.
Sleepaway Camp, Unhappy Campers, and Teenage Wasteland are now streaming on Shudder.
Tell us what you thought of the series in the comments!
