I think there are a handful of reasons why I chose this one for the curriculum. This is not a film that I was naturally drawn to in my childhood when I would be browsing the boxes at the video store. In fact, quite the opposite. And by the time I was in my VHS horror rental prime when I was around the age of 10, the sequel to Sleepaway Camp had already been released. And the video box art for the sequel, even when I was at the tender age of 10, felt to me like it was too silly for my time and attention. The box art for the sequel features a young adult woman. She's hiking through the forest. She's got a backpack on and in that backpack we see Leatherface's chainsaw. We see Jason Voorhees' requisite hockey mask. And we see Freddy Krueger's razor glove. And to me, even at that age, this was preposterously silly. It felt like a parody or a comedy. It didn't feel like something that was going to scare me. And with the original Sleepaway Camp sitting right next to it on the shelf, it completely suffered by association. I had zero interest in seeing it. But if we fast forward to the good old days when I lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn… as was often the case at the time, I was at the apartment of some friends that I went to Vassar with. We were with my friends Paul and Brian, and at the time, Paul was dating a woman named Marcy, who was the best friend of Randy Harrison, the actor. And we all regularly got together to watch movies. Often those movies were horror films. It just so happened that Marcy's favorite horror movie was Sleepaway Camp. One night she insisted that we all watch it together. So very grudgingly, I agreed. And we watched this film, and for many reasons [which are abundantly clear on the podcast], while this is not a great horror film, I think it's an important one. I'm not sure if the “I” in important is or is not a capital letter.
But there's a reason that Sleepaway Camp has a significance in the genre. This one came in the golden age of the slasher film, which we understand to be roughly from about 1978 to 1984. It owes to its predecessors, notably Friday the 13th from 1980, and a host of others like Madman and The Burning, both from 1981. The Burning may have lacked the subtlety and nuance of [Sleepaway Camp actor] Desiree Gould, but it did have Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and Holly Hunter, and it was edited by our guest Jack Sholder.
Sleepaway Camp breaks a lot of genre rules, or, possibly it chose to ignore them, or maybe it didn't even know them. Or maybe it's an exploitation film instead of a true slasher film, because some of it feels a little exploitative to me when I watch it. But when the title smashes on screen and we get that frantic orchestral score accompanying it, we are at Camp Arawak of the future, we're seeing it at a time that is after the events of the film have transpired. We've got mattresses strewn around. We've got a warning sign from the sheriff posted on the gate. There's a “for sale” snipe that's plastered over the Camp Arawak sign. Yet the sound editing suggests that as Aunt Kate in Haunted Honeymoon might say, we can still hear the echoes of the past.
When we cut to a sunnier, clearly more idyllic time, we think that we're seeing the titular sleepaway camp in its former glory days, but the joke is on us, because there is little sleep, and a lot of camp. And we get the tried and true horror trope of some irresponsible teenagers causing havoc at a lake, and a deadly boating accident occurs, the outcome of which is not immediately clear. And there are other tropes that we probably should have in this film, but don't.
Then we cut to a flash forward eight years. We're at a fair approximation of a comfortable, Georgian brick home with cornices and fan-like transoms over the doors. But inside the house, however, everything, and I do mean everything, is dialed up to 80’s eleven. We've got garish wallpaper and we've got a honey of a performance by Desiree Gould as the aforementioned inimitable Aunt Martha. And her performance is so over the top that as a first-time viewer I wondered if I would personally have the energy to go along on this ride. And it's sort of only in the film's conclusion that I realized I was looking at the leftmost bookend of the story when I met Aunt Martha. And her performance and her look, and she will reappear much later, looking like a vaudeville clown on acid. I think by contrast to the fairly naturalistic and understated performances of the child actors, I had to wonder if this character, Aunt Martha, was actually not intended to be mentally ill. And seemingly the choices get less appropriate and ostensibly more cringeworthy as we go on. They are so attenuated that I was reminded of the style and intensity and frankly the face and physicality of Charles Ludlam, if not Carolyn Purdy-Gordon in Stuart Gordon's 1986 spooker, Dolls. And a lot of this movie reminded me of Ludlam's Theater of the Ridiculous, of whom and of which I have been a student since my early teens, and whose performative ethos I attempted to incorporate in my own work throughout my career as a performer .
When the campers are arriving at Arawak, members of the staff are speaking about the children in uncomfortably inappropriate ways. They describe them as fresh chickens and baldies, which as you might expect, has nothing to do with their stereotypically 80s hairstyles, but rather the degree to which they may or may not have entered puberty.
This is not a particularly well-made film. It's not a subtly crafted screenplay. It's not expertly acted, although a handful of the performances might be described by our former guest Mickey Boardman as competent, but it is a quintessential 1980s time capsule. It can be a hell of a lot of fun. It has a lot of tight T-shirts and short shorts. It features members of the Under-12 set cursing like sailors, which I always find very funny. And I wonder when we first meet camper (or is it counselor?) Meg and she spells her name, M-E-G, if that didn't influence Tina's telling Rod as they walk to school with Nancy and Glenn in an early scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street that her name has four letters in it.
But I think what makes Sleepaway Camp unique and memorable in addition to its wacky aunts and unforgettable final image is the degree of queer coding at work in this motion picture. So it's not exactly odd that a performance in the first five minutes of the film should conure echoes of Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company. It was through that lens in the mid-aughts that I first viewed Sleepaway Camp. And I developed an appreciation for all of the things that it was and forgave the things that it wasn't.
And now, of course, when we think about the concept of camp, we have to understand that camp can be intentional or unintentional. And also that our assessment of any piece of art is necessarily informed by the time in which we experience it. And just to define our terms for our listeners, we can very simply define “camp” as something that is deliberately exaggerated, theatrical, affected, or flamboyant. It probably comes from the French word campe which means to assume a bold posture or strike a pose. Achieving the effect of camp or campiness effectively requires an elevation of something that's held in low regard toward a newer, higher appreciation.
Intentional camp is basically what I've just described. It's the deliberate use of this practice toward humorous ends. Whereas unintentional camp comes from a place of naivete or bad taste. Unintentional camp is often called pure camp. Something like Tommy Wiseau's The Room is an example of pure camp. Whereas the carefully constructed pastiche theater of Ludlam was a highly intellectual and intentional camp. And it's from an academic perspective that we have to view and understand Sleepaway Camp and its employment or deployment of these ideas of queer coding and intentional or unintentional camp. Angela has two daddies. Angela's doctor aunt is effectively a drag queen. The last frame of the film is either the most progressive and enlightened thing to be put to film in the ‘80s, or it's a deleterious freak show compartmentalization of otherness. The nature of the monster in Sleepaway Camp is either the best choice or the worst choice that could have been made.
I'm especially excited to have this conversation with Jack because his own film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, has undergone a reassessment in similar terms in the 38 years since it first hit the big screen. A documentary has even been made about this very subject. And while its reassessment probably centers more on its coding than it does on its camp value, (though the very heart of camp lives the idea of reassessment), it's specifically because of his perspective and experience that I wanted Jack to discuss this film with us.
To listen to our episode on Sleepaway Camp, click here.
Bradford Louryk