Sleepaway Camp<!--Alternative titles in countries aside from the film's native country do not need to be in lead--> is a 1983 American slasher film written and directed by Robert Hiltzik, and starring Mike Kellin (in his last on-screen appearance), Katherine Kamhi, and Paul DeAngelo alongside Jonathan Tiersten, Felissa Rose, Christopher Collet (in his film debut), and Karen Fields. The original entry in the Sleepaway Camp film series, it focuses on serial killings which occur at a summer camp for teenagers.
Filmed in upstate New York in the fall of 1982, Sleepaway Camp was released the following year by United Film Distributors. It earned approximately $11 million at the box office, but was met by largely unfavorable reviews from critics, many of whom deemed it exploitative and derivative of such films as Friday the 13th (1980).
In the years since its release, Sleepaway Camp has gone on to develop a cult following, a more positive reappraisal from critics, as well as garnering notoriety for its twist ending, which has been named as one of the most shocking and unforgettable in cinematic history. He was also inspired to make the film following the success of Friday the 13th, though he has denied that the film was a direct inspiration on the screenplay.
Hiltzik privately raised funding for the film through friends, family, and other "connections," eventually amassing a budget of $335,000 to make the film.
Casting
Unlike many of its contemporaries, which had adults portraying youth, the cast of Sleepaway Camp was primarily made up of adolescent actors. During casting for the role of Angela Baker, actresses were asked to stare wide-eyed into the camera while pretending to eat a chocolate bar. Felissa Rose was cast in her debut role as the character, and was paid only $5,000 for her performance. Dan Tursi, who played John Baker, was one of Hiltzik's classmates at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where he appeared in three of Hiltzik's short films. When auditioning for the role of Ricky Thomas, Jonathan Tiersten was asked by Hiltzik to curse him out, and thus was given the role. Both he and Rose initially did not get along, so they were taken bowling in order to bond with each other. They developed a romance during filming, but broke up soon after. Christopher Collet was cast as Paul. Katherine Kamhi and Thomas E. van Dell, who played Meg and Mike, dated during production. Kamhi also became close with Rose and Fields. When filming the skinny dipping scene, Loris Sallahian, who played Billy, was displeased with the conditions and walked off the set, but returned after a personal chat with Hiltzik. John E. Dunn and Lisa Buckler were cast as Kenny and Leslie, respectively; during filming of the scene in which the canoe flips over in the lake, Dunn cut the top of his hand open and had to be rushed to hospital. Hiltzik sought Mike Kellin to portray camp owner Mel Kostic, and managed to track him down to his home in Nyack, New York, after Kellin's agent initially rejected the screenplay. Tatosian managed to contact Kellin via phone, and convinced him to take the role. Kellin was ill with lung cancer during filming, and died on August 26, 1983, three months prior to the film's release.
The cast and crew's relatives and some local kids played some of the campers leaving the buses near the beginning of the film. Willy Kuskin, who played Mozart, was genuinely bullied by the other kids during filming. Frank Trent Saladino, who played Gene, had to intervene and protect him.
Filming
Principal photography of Sleepaway Camp took place at Camp Algonquin (which Hiltzik attended himself as a child) in Argyle, New York. Filming began in September 1982 and lasted five weeks. Hiltzik dedicated the film to his mother, who died in a car accident before production began. The film had been storyboarded but after the first day of filming, the film was already behind schedule. The storyboards could not be used and were thrown out. imitating David Bowie. They were recorded using a 4-track Teac cassette recorder, a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, a Yamaha keyboard, and a Boss drum machine. Miami, and West Palm Beach. Screenings began in Texas on February 10, 1984, including in Austin, Fort Worth, and Houston.
The film opened in the San Francisco Bay Area on March 23, 1984, followed by a Los Angeles release on May 25, 1984.
Home media
In the United Kingdom, the film was released on VHS by CBS/Fox Video under the alternative title Nightmare Vacation in the spring of 1984.
In the United States, Anchor Bay Entertainment released Sleepaway Camp on DVD on August 8, 2000. Anchor Bay reissued this disc as part of a four-disc set titled the Sleepaway Camp Survival Kit on August 20, 2002, which also contained the film's two sequels, as well as a bonus disc featuring footage from the unfinished third sequel. This boxed set, which featured a medical red cross on the front cover, was discontinued in late 2002 after the Red Cross filed a complaint against Anchor Bay, which subsequently redesigned the box art to remove the cross logo. In 2005, the Canadian-based Legacy Entertainment released a region-free budget DVD release of the film. Unlike the original VHS release, this release contains numerous edits to the film to either shorten violence or certain moments like dialogue.
Scream Factory released the film in a collector's edition Blu-ray set on May 27, 2014. This release contains a 2K scan of the original camera negative, and this release also has the film in its original uncut version, unlike the DVD released by Anchor Bay.
Reception
Box office
Upon its New York City release over the Thanksgiving week in 1983, Sleepaway Camp grossed $430,000 from 85 theaters. The film earned $90,000 during its opening weekend in Los Angeles in May 1984, screening at 15 theaters. By the end of its theatrical run, it had gone on to gross a total of $11 million.
Critical response
Contemporary
Upon its original release, the film was frequently compared to Friday the 13th due to their shared settings and whodunit plot structure. A review in The Courier-Journal characterized the film as a "low-budget slasher in the Friday the 13th mold, with teen-age mayhem at a summer camp", while Rick Lyman of The Philadelphia Inquirer uniformly lambasted the film, criticizing its performances, writing, and twist ending. Linda Gross of the Los Angeles Times felt the film was derivative and gruesome, but conceded that its pacing was adept and that director Hiltzik portrayed the often cruel and abusive behavior of teenagers towards another young person.
In the Chula Vista Star-Newss review, the film was deemed "a tasteless picture about mysterious murders at a summer youth camp that obscenely blends beheadings, stabbings, pubescent impulses, homosexuality, and transvestism" with a cast of junior-high-school actors. George Williams of The Sacramento Bee made similar criticisms of the acting, and described the film as "mindless" and "dirty". Paul Willistein of The Morning Call described the film as "simply horrible", writing that its campy sensibility is unsuccessful as it is "intended to be a bonafide horror film".
The News-Press gave it a favorable review, calling it "a shockingly good slasher film, if you use the relatively fine, first Friday the 13th as a measuring stick... it's just another crazed killer stalking nubile summer campers. But, this time, there are some truly creative killings and interesting plot twists". The San Francisco Chronicles Peter Stack also praised the film as a "great scuzz movie from top to bottom" and a "little masterpiece of hostility comedy," noting that "there's not one likable character, a factor that should serve as an excellent release valve for all the people who absolutely hate teenagers." Richard Martin, writing for the Ottawa Citizen, found the film's screenplay underdeveloped and lacking suspense, but praised its conclusion as effective and frightening, noting: "The very last image of Sleepaway Camp is so shocking and deeply disturbing it's given me goosebumps every time I recall it."
Modern assessment
In the years since its release, Sleepaway Camp has developed a cult following and garnered critical reappraisal. Its twist ending has been distinguished by audiences and critics as one of the most shocking in the slasher genre's history, as well as in cinema history in general.
On Metacritic, the film was reviewed by four critics and got a rank of 58 out of a 100, which indicates "mixed or average reviews".
The website Bloody Disgusting gave the film a positive review, praising Felissa Rose's performance and the film's twist ending calling it "one of the most shocking seen since, possibly, Hitchcock's Psycho".
Film scholar Bartłomiej Paszylk called the film "an exceptionally bad movie but a very good slasher". Commenting on the performances in the film, film scholar Thomas Sipos wrote that "[the film] feels odd due to its contrasting acting styles. Most of the cast performs in a naturalistic manner, whereas Desiree Gould's performance as Aunt Martha is strikingly stylistic: broadly overplayed to the point of caricature".
In his book The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: A Historical Survey (2009), Paszylk characterized Sleepaway Camp as "elevat[ing] the kids to the position of the movie's mass protagonist and becomes a tricky metaphor of the unspeakable pains and anxieties of growing up". He further commented on the film's conclusion: "The epiphanous ending brings Sleepaway Camp further away from the likes of Friday the 13th and closer to such 1980s 'slashers with a twist' as Happy Birthday to Me (1981) and April Fool's Day (1986), but Hiltzik's movie goes even further than that: in this case the denouement doesn't just add a new dimension to everything we saw up to this point, but it pushes its way deep into our minds and stays with us forever".
The film was featured on episode 48 of the podcast How Did This Get Made? where hosts Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, June Diane Raphael, and guest host Zack Pearlman struggled to decipher the film's opening moments, due to the ambiguous relationships established at the beginning of the film. Scheer later recalled that it had been the most fan-requested film "by a landslide".
Criticism
Sleepaway Camp has garnered contemporary criticism for its representation of a transgender villain. Willow Maclay, a transgender writer for Cléo magazine, criticized the film for its "equation of mental instability with having grown up in a gender role not concurrent with your identity. Nearly every single transgender person grows up being raised in a gender role that does not fit, and that doesn't mean that they are mentally ill or seriously violent".
thumb|right|upright|Transgender activist [[Calpernia Addams argues that the character of Angela is not actually transgender, but has been forced to live as a girl despite being designated as a male.]]
Calpernia Addams, a transgender author and activist, commented in a 2021 interview with Fangoria that the character of Angela "is not even really trans... This whole situation with Angela is a child who was forced into this quote-unquote transition".
Transgender writer Alice Collins of Bloody Disgusting said that Sleepaway Camp "is steeped in queerness, especially when compared to its contemporaries. In its day it took a deeper look into the subject matter than that of other films. Angela and Peter's dad is a closeted gay man, there's forced gender bending (which is abuse rather than queer but people will see it as such), and the majority of the scantily clad people in the film are men with all those very short shorts that leave little to the imagination while there is little skin shown of the feminine variety". Collins argues that Angela is a transgender girl, noting that, in the film's sequels, Angela is presented as a woman who uses feminine pronouns: "So despite Aunt Martha being insane, she just happened to stumble upon a person who was already a girl; and it was an accident that her brainwashing worked".
Franchise
Sequels
In the late 1980s, Hiltzik sold the rights to the successive Sleepaway Camp films, after which Michael A. Simpson directed two sequels, Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989). In them, Angela (now played by Bruce Springsteen's younger sister, Pamela Springsteen) resurfaces at a nearby summer camp, but this time masquerading as a counselor after a sex reassignment surgery. Much like at the previous camp, she gleefully tortures and kills anyone who misbehaves or annoys her. These films had more of a satirical comic tone than the original.
Another sequel, Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor, directed by Jim Markovic, was partially filmed in the early 1990s but left incomplete. In 2002, the unfinished footage was released and made available as an exclusive fourth disc in Anchor Bay/Starz Entertainment's Sleepaway Camp DVD boxed set. In 2012, the film was completed using archival footage from the first three films and released on DVD and Amazon Video on Demand.
A fifth film, Return to Sleepaway Camp, was completed in 2003 and initially struggled to have its visual effects completed. It was directed by Robert Hiltzik, the director of the original 1983 film. According to Fangoria, the digital effects were redone from 2006 to 2008. The film was released in 2008.
Unofficial sequel
Karen Fields reprised her role of Judy from Sleepaway Camp in the 2014 short film Judy, although it wasn't technically a sequel. The Jeff Hayes-directed film was included in the collector's edition Blu-ray release of the original Sleepaway Camp.
Proposed remake
The purportedly final film in the Sleepaway Camp series, titled Sleepaway Camp Reunion, was also announced to be in the works. Distribution had been arranged via Magnolia Pictures. Creator Robert Hiltzik, who recovered the rights to the franchise, has stated that he would make the film if his budget was met. However, Hiltzik and Return To Sleepaway Camp producer Jeff Hayes later announced themselves as having started work on a reboot that would retain the key characters and elements of the original film with additional storyline elements and a dose of modernizing. As of Summer 2014, Hiltzik was reportedly tweaking the script. In addition, Michael Simpson, the director of Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland, wrote a script for an additional film called Sleepaway Camp: Berserk.
By December 2020, another Sleepaway Camp installment was announced to be in development, starring Felissa Rose.
In September 2025, it was announced that Kenan Thompson's production company Artists for Artists (AFA) has acquired the rights to remake Sleepaway Camp with original writer/director Robert Hiltzik.