Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Best Plot Twist In LGBT Horror

When you’ve watched dozens, if not hundreds of 80s horror films, it can be difficult to find something that truly shocks you. I remember a professor mentioning Sleepaway Camp (1983) in film school, but I never really thought much of it. When my wife and I sat down on a whim to watch it, neither of us expected anything out of the ordinary. But the farther along it went, the more I realized that something was off. Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp takes you on a wild, transgressive ride that leads to the most shocking and controversial plot twist I’ve ever seen in a slasher movie. And as a heads-up: this review will have spoilers!

Stream, rent, or purchase Sleepaway Camp on Amazon.

The film follows Angela Baker, a shy and introverted teenage girl. Angela’s traumatic past is revealed through flashbacks, showing that she lost her father and twin sibling in a tragic boating accident years prior. After losing her family, Angela is sent to live with her very eccentric Aunt Martha and protective cousin, Ricky. Aunt Martha gives some strange speech about what a wonderful summer it will be before pushing the two young teens out the door to camp.

Upon their arrival at Camp Arawak, Angela becomes the target of ridicule and bullying from her fellow campers, as well as some staff members. She refuses to speak to anyone except Ricky (and she barely responds to him). The perverted camp cook attempts to molest Angela, only to be severely burned by a pot of boiling water. Though it was clearly intentional, the camp’s owner, Mel, tries to downplay the incident. But as the summer progresses, a series of gruesome and mysterious murders plague the campers and staff.

Naturally, Mel becomes increasingly paranoid about the reputation of his business and suspects Ricky to be the killer. Meanwhile, a camper named Paul develops a romantic interest in Angela, and they share a kiss, which further fuels the camp’s gossip mill. As the body count rises, the police begin looking for the missing campers, only to make a genuinely shocking discovery. 

On the surface, Sleepaway Camp plays out like many other slashers from the early 80s. Bullies and objectively “bad” people turn up dead in increasingly shocking ways. In the climax, the killer is revealed and we’re given some sense of closure. However, Sleepaway Camp diverges from more mainstream slashers in a few important ways. First and foremost, the central characters are all pretty young. In fact, the camp doesn’t seem to have a coherent age range; there are young adult campers mixed in with kindergartners. Nonetheless, the majority of campers seem to fall somewhere between 12 and 15 years old, which is still a pretty young demographic for a slasher.

Not to sound like a prude, but the language is also far more graphic than you would expect from an 80s horror movie. And again, it’s an 80s horror movie mostly starring very young teens (or actors portraying very young teens). So it feels a little strange to constantly hear people hurling curse words at each other that would be more at home in a Tarantino script. Again, I don’t want to seem priggish, but it certainly caught my attention and made the whole thing feel a little “off” from the start.

Speaking of “off,” you get to enjoy an extremely bizarre performance from Desiree Gould as Aunt Martha. The filmmakers want her to be eccentric to the point of being insane to serve the plot later on, but her performance is so theatrical and out of place compared to the relatively natural (by 80s standards) performances from the rest of the cast. It helps make all the killing seem more pastiche than painful. One could argue that it even borders on camp (no pun intended).

The ending is what separates Sleepaway Camp from the many slashers that promise a surprise killer and deliver the usual answer. I found Prom Night (1980) painfully predictable. Here, even after I began to suspect Angela, I wasn’t prepared for the final moment. The film spent so much time making her a target of ridicule that the reveal feels like a sudden change in where it wants our sympathy to go.

The flashbacks reveal that the child killed in the boating accident was Angela. Her surviving twin, Peter, was taken in by Aunt Martha, who decided to raise him as Angela. At the camp, the person everyone knows as Angela is the killer. Then the film adds its notorious final shock: a naked body, a horrified reaction from the counselors, and a frozen, contorted face making some ungodly sound. Felissa Rose explained how the shot was made: her face was molded into a mask worn by an adult body double, while the close-ups used her performance. The effect is genuinely unnerving.

But what, exactly, are we supposed to find frightening? Angela has killed people; the scene has already revealed that. The camera holds back the view of her body as though it were a second and even greater revelation. The counselors’ response makes gender, anatomy, and violence come together as one last jolt. I can admire how forcefully Hiltzik stages that moment and still question what he asks the audience to recoil from.

It also makes little sense to declare with certainty that Angela is transgender, or that she cannot be. The film shows Martha imposing an identity on a child. It gives us far less access to how that child understands herself years later. Rose has described Angela as a young person trying to discover who she is. Film scholar Cáel M. Keegan offers another reading: a surviving boy forced to live as a girl, whose loss of control over his identity is the story’s underlying horror. Neither reading erases the way the final shot uses a gendered body as a frightening spectacle.

Aunt Martha becomes more disturbing when viewed through that question of control. Her theatrical manner initially struck me as ridiculous, almost as though she had wandered in from another film. After the ending, her insistence on naming and defining the child in her care gives that performance a nastier side. Still, the film doesn’t show that an imposed identity inevitably produces a killer. It supplies fragments of childhood trauma and expects them to explain a whole series of murders, including the death of someone who had shown Angela affection.

The flashback involving Angela’s father and another man deserves similar attention. It establishes a same-sex relationship; it does not establish that witnessing it caused Angela’s violence. Elsewhere, the camera’s interest in the boys’ bodies, the camp’s gossip, and the adults’ fixation on the children create an atmosphere in which everyone is being watched and judged. The predatory cook is part of that atmosphere, though his behavior does not somehow cancel out the ending’s treatment of gender.

This is why Sleepaway Camp is far more interesting to me than a routine slasher, despite the problems in its final reveal. Angela is bullied, isolated, and denied much control over her life. Yet the film also turns her body into its ultimate image of horror. Peacock (2010) similarly makes a character’s gender presentation part of a thriller’s ominous secret. Even the much less successful It’s Pat (1994) exposes how frantic other people can be when they feel entitled to classify someone. Sleepaway Camp has the opportunity to examine that entitlement, but its last shot also exploits it.

None of this undoes my first reaction. The final scene sent a chill down my spine, and its sheer excess made me laugh at the same time. I still think it is one of the most memorable endings I’ve seen in an ’80s slasher. Looking at it more closely has made the film stranger to me, not less effective. Its craft and its ugly assumptions are both part of why that image stays in my head.

But if you are going to watch Sleepaway Camp (and I hope you do), don’t just skip to the ending. The entire film is well worth watching. Is it weird? Absolutely. Is the acting hit-and-miss? For sure. But it also features the best plot twist I’ve seen in a long time, making it a surprising classic of 80s horror. 

And before you go check it out, I’d like to mention that I watched Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988) and Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland (1989). The second one is watchable (at best) and makes brief references to the ending of the original film, but the third one is an absolute chore to get through. So, don’t waste your time on the sequels. 

Sleepaway Camp (1983) Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

If you’d like to watch Sleepaway Camp (1983), the film is currently available to stream, rent, or purchase via Amazon.