Sleepaway Camp (1983)

“If she were any quieter, she’d be dead” – Meg

Sleepaway camp is an unusual slasher film, and that’s putting it mildly. Filmed on a budget that makes the Friday the 13th films look like sprawling epics, the movie has become a cult favourite over the years, amassing a sizeable following, grossing over $11 million at the box office and who knows how much more on home video. Not bad for a film produced for $350,000.

It has mainly a very young cast of early teens, most of whom are making their screen debuts, many of whom would fade back into obscurity, one of whom is still a beloved scream queen still working in the industry to this day.

Sleepaway Camp, although a shameless cash-in on the Friday the 13th franchise which was quickly gathering momentum along with all the other date-themed slashers that proliferated in the early eighties has endured by having possibly the most disturbing, shocking and memorable twist ending of the sub-genre at that time. Once seen, it’s impossible to forget. But more of that later.

There’s a story here I want to relate. I bought the trilogy box set on impulse several years ago, when I was head writer for Gorezone Magazine. I watched the three films and thoroughly enjoyed them, little knowing that only a couple of weeks later, I would be handed an assignment to interview the star of Sleepaway Camp, Felissa Rose, who’d just finished work on another horror movie. She was an absolute delight to talk to and I’ll be including some of Felissa’s insights from my transcription of our chat in this article.

The film opens in 1975, when a father and his young son and daughter are on a boat enjoying the day. Nearby on the lake some irresponsible teens are goofing around on a speedboat, their reckless neglect takes them on a course directly to the father and kids, who are mown down in the water and killed. Only the daughter is shown to have survived.

Flash forward to the then-present day of 1983, the little girl is now in her early teens. Angela (Felissa Rose) is understandably withdrawn, introverted and reluctant to speak. She has been raised by her Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould) who is, to put it mildly, whimsically eccentric. Angela is going to summer camp, specifically Camp Arawak with her cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). Ricky is more outspoken and bit scrappy and he looks out for his quiet cousin as a brother would.

It doesn’t take long for Angela’s reticence and reluctance to join with the camp activities to make her the target for some spiteful bullying from several of the kids, and one unpleasant counsellor named Meg (Katherine Kamhi) who joins with “popular girl” Judy (Karen Fields) in giving poor Angela grief.

Camp owner Mel (Mile Kellin) turns a blind eye to this, and a whole lot more – concerned only with keeping the camp open at all costs so he can make some money. He even blatantly ignores the fact that his cook is clearly a child molester. To explain, Angela hasn’t eaten for three days, when a well-meaning counsellor takes her to the kitchen and tells the cook to make her something she’d like to eat. The cook is an opportunist and has other plans in the store-room, until Ricky interrupts just in time, and is in turn roughed up by the cook and told to keep quiet about what he saw.

Mel sees both kids come tearing out of the store-room and seconds later, the cook, who is fastening his trousers and says nothing. Nobody in the audience is disappointed to see the cook get his just desserts (sorry, couldn’t resist) when he’s drenched in a vat full of boiling water by an unseen assailant and stretchered off screaming in agony, most of his body a mass of blisters and peeling skin. (He had that coming, to be fair.)

Mel writes the incident off as an accident, claiming he doesn’t want the children upset.

It’s a little harder for him to ignore the mounting death toll as the film continues. A cruel prank played at night on the lake on one of the other girls sees her tormentor drowned (oddly, none of the other kids seem to miss him, and the girl concerned isn’t hauled off for questioning as a suspect).

Meanwhile, one of the boys at the camp is befriending Angela and asks her to go and see a film in the main hall with him, that evening he kisses her goodnight but she pulls away abruptly. You might think that things are getting better for Angela with a boy taking a liking to her (Paul, played by Christopher Collet) and Ricky trying to beat up whoever torments her – but they’re really not. During a water fight, some boys throw a water balloon at her. The boy meets a grisly end on the toilet (nobody should ever die on a toilet – it’s undignified, but let’s make an exception here). A broomstick is used to lock the cubicle door from the outside, and a beehive is shaken up and dropped in, again by an unseen assailant. (Honestly, where are the police?)

Unconcerned by the spiralling death rate, Paul and Angela share a moment of affection at the lakeside after dark, but again Angela freezes, recalling in flashback, a time when as a small child, she and her brother saw her father and his lover in bed. (I’m not sure if the fact that his lover is also male has traumatised her – this is a 1983 film, after all. But she runs away from Paul. Nothing more is really made of the flashback scene, it’s kind of a bizarre oddity mid-film that seems to have no bearing on the plot.)

Popular girl Judy seduces Paul the following day, out of bitchiness more than anything else, and Angela sees this. Still refusing to swim or shower with the other girls, Angela finds herself cornered by Judy and counsellor Meg at the lakeside, during a swimming session and gets thrown in to the water. Ricky is held back by Mel, but breaks free and rescues her while the other kids jeer and throw sand. (This is literally the worst summer camp in the history of summer camps. Crystal Lake is a breeze in comparison.)

Mel really is a sleazeball, and that evening, on her night off, he has a date with Meg – a girl clearly young enough to be his granddaughter, but when she fails to show and he goes looking for her, she’s found in the shower with her back slashed open along the spine. That’s not his only problem – Judy is also dead having been raped (offscreen, thankfully) with her own curling tongs. Convinced that the feisty Ricky is the killer, Mel catches him and beats the crap out of him in rage and despair – but he’s got the wrong person, and gets an arrow through his throat. A short distance away, a group of the kids camping out for the night are butchered with a hatchet – these are the jeering, sand throwing pack of hyenas.

Finding Ricky barely alive, the remaining counsellors call the cop (I think there’s only one in the whole state) and go looking for the remaining campers, finding Paul and Angela by the lakeside. It’s a tender scene, and she seems to be cradling his head in her lap. Until she stands up and his severed head rolls to the ground. She’s naked, bloodied, holding a hunting knife, uttering a bestial growl… And she’s male!

What a plot twist.

It wasn’t Angela who survived the childhood incident – it was her brother. When Martha took him in, she already had a boy, Ricky. She wanted a girl, so Angela’s brother Peter was raised as a girl and renamed Angela. This, along with the trauma of the accident, has driven her insane. The tormenting by the other kids was the final straw that drove her homicidal.

I asked Felissa how she got involved with the film at the tender age of thirteen;

“I had read the script. When I auditioned for the film, writer/director Robert Hiltzik and myself immediately hit it off. I told my parents that I thought I’d got the part and they said: “Don’t be silly there are hundreds of little girls auditioning. It’s good that you’re positive but don’t get your hopes up”. But I definitely knew I had the role because of the way that Robert would talk to me and the way we would sit around.

At that time, his girlfriend, who is now his wife, she came into the waiting area and told all the moms and the kids that there was a part of this movie where the little girl was going to be a boy and were we okay with that part of the movie?

The way my mom was - such a stage mother “oh yes, anything”. She was so agreeable and didn’t know what the real facts were. And then, when I finally did get the role, you have managers and agents who are protecting you. We realised that it just sounded like a great ending. It didn’t feel or seem like anything that was terrible or scarring on me as a kid. It was when I saw the actual film that was shot that I was definitely affected and taken aback and I thought... “Wow...that’s what we did?”

I asked what was it like, being thirteen years old, cast as the killer in a slasher movie and especially one with a plot twist that crazy and at the time, controversial;

“It’s sort of like when you’re in the moment. I think that any experience in life when you’re in the moment is not as powerful in hindsight when you’re looking back. I believe that I didn’t realise how impressionable and horrific the film was as it turned out to be.

So here I was at thirteen reading the script and wanting to be an actress. I had just done some theatre and commercials. I hadn’t done any movies. I have always been an adventurous spirit and I was looking for something exciting. My parents were very thrilled for me having a professional job. They were always there with me. I was like I could’ve been doing a comedy.

When you’re on a film set and the cameras are rolling, you’re just dealing with one or two lines in the moment. I never saw any blood; I never saw any weapons. I wasn’t there for the final shot. I mean, I was there, somewhere around, but I wasn’t there when they were actually showing the nude boy with a mask of my face attached to his face.

Ed French who’d done the special effects made a mould of my face and put it on the young boy. Well, he was about seventeen or eighteen. The close-ups were my face, and the mask had to be put on a boy who was my size, my weight. I was a small thirteen-year-old and he had to be eighteen years of age to do nudity.

He had to shave his body, to be hairless as I was in the whole movie. There were so many elements that were part of it that people don’t realise. Apparently, the kid got very drunk and was very upset by it, which I don’t blame him. I mean you’re standing there naked and he probably only got a couple of hundred dollars and a bottle of Jack. He was a good sport, and I think he’s the real guy that people should try to hunt down. I don’t think anybody even knows his name. He’s the real star of the movie (laughs).

I was with a lot of my eighth-grade classmates who came with me to see the movie, and it was a shock. It wasn’t a shock like “Oh my God I’m damaged” it was “Holy cow, that’s pretty weird”.

And as for the small independent film’s ongoing legacy as a cult favourite? Felissa had this to say;

“I never thought it would be as long lasting as it is or that anybody would remember it. It was a horror movie, and at that time, people weren’t that interested in horror movies. They were becoming popular, but it wasn’t mainstream. So, I thought I’d just go about my life and whatnot and it wasn’t until 2000 and the internet that I realised that it had really stuck with people. I’m even married to one of Sleepaway Camp’s biggest fans.

My husband is a fanatic over that movie, and the whole series. On his guitar that he plays in his band, he has the Angela face from that last shot, mouth open and the eyes to the side.”