The Big Picture

• Sleepaway Camp is a notorious 1983 slasher film known for its bad acting, gruesome kills, and bizarre plot twist.
• The film differentiates itself by featuring hateful and sleazy characters, creating a unique viewing experience.
• While Sleepaway Camp initially follows slasher conventions, its problematic and shocking finale tarnishes the overall enjoyment of the movie.

When people think of what the best summer camp slasher is, they typically think of the Friday the 13th series, but all the real ones know that Sleepaway Camp is one of the subgenre's most notorious entries... for good and for bad. This grimy yet unintentionally hilarious 1983 slasher is full of bad acting, nasty kills, and loads of killing time between gruesome deaths. Sounds like a typical slasher, right? Well, Sleepaway Camp differentiates itself in that it is a bizarrely made film. Camp Arawak, the film's setting, is full of the most hateful, sleaziest campers and staff. Everyone is such a despicable monster in this movie that you won't be able to help but laugh in disbelief. The film largely plays out by the books for slasher standards, but in reality, builds toward a finale that you'll never be able to predict... one that, sadly, aggressively pulls the rug out from under the fun that you've had up until that point.

Sleepaway Camp came at the tail end of the slasher boom of the late '70s and early '80s. By this time, Halloween already had two sequels, there were three Friday the 13th movies, with a sea of other entries like My Bloody Valentine and The Slumber Party Massacre sandwiched in between. There was even already another summer camp killer movie that didn't involve Jason Voorhees — 1981's The Burning. Seemingly, everything that could be done had been done by 1983 (until Scream would flip the subgenre on its meta-head 13 years later). Sleepaway Camp was part of the trend of slasher horrors at the time. Loads of slashers barely manage to get by on aimlessly killing time between slicing up victims. Sleepaway Camp, admittedly, does the same, but with much more bite than most other films in its shared subgenre. However, with such a bizarre and problematic finale, it's impossible to look back on the movie now and only see the good when it is so tainted by its final twist.

What Is 'Sleepaway Camp' About?

This 1983 slasher follows two cousins, Angela Baker (Felissa Rose) and Ricky Thomas (Jonathan Tiersten), as they pack up their bags and head to Camp Arawak for the summer. Angela has crippling social anxiety and is extremely introverted, as opposed to her loud, sailor's mouth cousin, but the two help balance each other out and make for a good pairing heading into a season away from home. Camp Arawak is anything but the ideal summer local, though. Pervy chefs, sleazy camp directors, neglectful counselors, and brutal campers make this place the resting grounds for a terrible time. Oh right, and a mysterious killer is stalking the campgrounds. Sure, the film sets its table with everything you come to expect, but what's actually being served?

Writer-director Robert Hiltzik seemed to go out of his way to make Sleepaway Camp the most deplorable slasher movie yet. Hiltzik shot the film at his childhood summer camp, giving it the feeling of a memory that has been stowed away for years and years, and unlocked for this special, raunchy occasion. Obviously, none of these events actually ever took place, but the movie has an oddly personal feeling because of Hiltzik's attachment to the camp. In a time when most filmmakers were trying to show squeaky clean, idealized versions of everyday life, Hiltzig seems to be pulling from real childhood experiences.

In 'Sleepaway Camp,' The Campers Actually Talk Like Kids

These kids talk the way that kids actually talk, swearing left and right and making fun of each other at every turn. It makes for a shocking but honestly hilarious viewing experience. One comeback from Ricky in particular stands out, with an older camper telling him "Eat s--- and die, Ricky." to which he replies "Eat s--- and live, Bill." Usually in slasher movies, the characters might sneak off to get some action or occasionally curse here and there, but otherwise, they're largely G-rated, completely innocent fodder purely put on screen to be slaughtered. Not the kids at Camp Arawak. Angela seems to be the special target of loads of bullies, particularly a teenage girl named Judy (Karen Fields). This kid is such a turd to Angela! She's a little devil the entire film and for no reason! These kids will keep you laughing the entire movie, but less from actually being funny and more from the fact that you can't believe what's coming out of their mouths.

'Sleepaway Camp' Has Some Great Kills

When Sleepaway Camp isn't being flat-out audacious or unintentionally hilarious, it does get pretty gruesome. The movie kicks off with somebody getting run over by a boat, which feels like a cop-out at first, but that scene is more to establish the possible horrors of summer activities. The movie ranges from boiling water being poured all over someone to a strange kill where someone is stung to death by bees. The makeup effects done by Ed French, Diane Lawrence, and Suzen Poshek are honestly way better than any independent '80s slasher deserves to be, especially that boiling water kill. Nasty!

What Happens at the End of 'Sleepaway Camp'?

If you know anything about Sleepaway Camp, you likely know about its big reveal. Sleepaway Camp's ending is one of the most shocking in all of movie history. You'd likely see it coming that Angela is the killer, there's no doubt about it. Her secrecy throughout the entire movie, the degree of flack that she takes from both the campers and staff, and the particular people that get picked off throughout the movie all point to the obvious. Hiltzik had to have known this, so he spun this twist even wilder — Angela is a boy. Now, you might be thinking, what's wrong with that? Well, before getting into the exploitative nature of the character, the reveal itself sits about as well as a grenade in your lap. Two kids find Angela alone on the beach, completely naked, covered in blood, armed with a massive knife, and holding the severed head of a dead camper. Hiltzik cuts to some flashbacks that offer some insight into why Angela, actually named Peter, became a girl, then the film cuts back to the present. Peter's mouth is wide open as he's making a deep, disturbing hissing noise, the film's colors fade into a negative image, and the credits roll. Yikes.

This ending has, for obvious reasons, been viewed as increasingly problematic in the years since its release. Revealing the villain of your film to be a transgender killer in a fashion designed to shock audiences as much as possible has been viewed by most modern audiences as transphobic, and it's hard not to see it this way. Not only that, it's implied that Angela experienced some form of trauma after discovering that her father was having an affair with another man. So basically, Hiltzik paints a huge anti-LGBTQ portrait as his reasoning behind all the evil in this film. Despite being 40 years ago, it's hard to imagine that this ending was 100% accepted as okay in 1983. Watching this in 2023, though? It's just a hugely shocking, hateful way to cap off a movie that was already odd, to begin with, and ends up retroactively staining every moment that came before it. In a time when the transgender community didn't have very much screen time at all in films, having one of the few being the villain of a slasher movie doesn't exactly land in the filmmakers' defense.

Horror Movies Like 'Sleepaway Camp' and 'Psycho' Abused Transgender Identity

This sort of twist had a long history before Robert Hiltzik ever got his nasty mitts all over it. Psycho is the flagship beginning of transgender killers, with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) dressing up like his mother whenever he stalks and murders his victims. Yes, Bates isn't transgender, but exploiting his relationship with gender in a way that is meant to shock and terrify audiences definitely kicked things off. This ugly trend took a particular wave of popularity in the '80s, with Terror Train using a similar "the killer isn't a boy/girl like you thought it was!" reveal, as did the films Deadly Blessing, Dressed to Kill, and Unhinged. It even rears its ugly head in films like 2012's House at the End of the Street, a film that goes to show that, even though it feels as though we've come a long way by cutting this hateful horror trope, we still aren't far from it.

On another hand, Felissa Rose, the actress who plays Angela, doesn't think the film is transphobic. In a recent interview with Dread Central, Rose stated "I feel as though Angela was a typical adolescent trying to find her gender identification and sexual orientation and I thought that was extremely exciting for 1982. It was ahead of its time." The ending of Sleepaway Camp is so dicey any way you roll it that, no matter how you feel about it, you're likely to feel strongly about it. But to most, it's a pretty tasteless and desperate attempt at shock value.

The Sleepaway Camp series would go on to spawn three unofficial sequels, one of which wasn't even actually finished. Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor was originally canned during production in 1992, but was assembled from the surviving footage that they did have, and released on home video in 2012. After directing the first film in the franchise, Hiltzik would take decades away from the director's chair, now acting as a partner of a New York City law firm. In the 2000s, he would finally return to helm the first official sequel to the original — 2008's Return to Sleepaway Camp. Despite Hiltzig's involvement, fans of the series weren't too happy with his follow-up. There was talk of an entire franchise reboot in the early 2010s, but nothing has come to fruition yet.

Sleepaway Camp is almost the perfect film for slasher fans who are looking to shake things up and want to watch a movie that does something different with the subgenre. It's a shocking, deplorable, and honestly pretty hilarious time that you so wish could be remembered better. The film is truly more entertaining than 90% of '80s slashers until it drops the ball big time. It doesn't even drop the ball, it straight up pops it and throws it in the trash. Don't worry too much about the sequels, they're there if you're deadly curious. Just know that it's all about the original 1983 flick — a film that could have been one of the greatest slasher films of all time, but embarrassingly fumbled its victory when it could have made a game-winning touchdown.

Sleepaway Camp is available to watch for free on Tubi in the U.S.

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