Robert Hiltzik’s filmography is based around one film, Sleepaway Camp. The director made the film for only 350,000 dollars at the tender age of twenty-five. Its opening weekend in New York toppled what many viewed as horror in and of itself, Barbara Streisand’s Yentl. Since then, the film has sustained numerous sequels and continues to be the underdog favorite of many a horror fan.
I’ll be honest. I put off watching this film when I began to seriously watch horror because its peers of the time, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, etc. simply outshined this little surprise gem in the press. However, unlike most of the slasher films from this decade, the movie makes a concerted effort to leave nothing to chance and actually works for its audience. This isn’t to say that is a masterpiece of cinema but it does mean to imply that it deserves a place higher up on the rung of period horror and I believe, feeling out the current strand of favor for the film signaled by a box set of the Sleepaway films which has recently hit the market, viewers are now beginning to give the work its just dues.
I continued to go along with its underrated reputation for the first half of the film due to two factors: The movie opens with the character of Angela as a young child (Colette Lee Corcoran) as she witnesses her father, John (Dan Tursi) and sibling (yes, I’m using that ambiguous term intentionally), die in a boating accident. Now, after we cut back from the boat which pummeled the two, we find John’s corpse in a dead man’s float without a single abrasion. Secondly, the following scene, which takes place eight years later, finds Angela (Felissa Rose) at her Aunt Martha’s (Desiree Gould) as the latter is about to set her and Angela’s cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) off to Camp Arawak for the summer. Gould’s acting is so poor that I started to shift around uneasily due to the fact that the previous non sequitur, atop Gould’s performance, gave me no reason to believe that the second-tier press that the film had received wasn’t modest generosity at best. However, to my surprise as I was to discover later, the opening scenes were well crafted and quite deliberate. Hiltzik was smiling at me and I didn’t even know it.
Midway through the film, as the expansive cast began to die off slowly, I realized that Hiltzik was giving more time to the characters, the camp, and the atmosphere than any other camp-based horror film in recent memory. I sat up at this epiphany and started to take an active interest in the film.
Also, I realized that the director had wisely worked around his meager budget in his selection of pre-teen, early adolescent cast because such people are indeed stereotypes due to the fact that they are so influenced by peer pressure that their actions seem reasonable when they come off as sterile. We have petty viciousness, overly naïve sensibilities, good ol’ boy mentalities, etc. flooding the screen throughout. Thus, I have to issue benefit of the doubt to the amateur actors because the cardboard nature of the various campers would be just that given their age and the setting.
Hiltzik seems to actually care about development and the storyline, which is not a mere change from the genre norm in this regard but necessary in order for the audience to feel the full weight of the climax’s impact, as he lets the killings slowly rise in temperature on the back burner (a en masse body count doesn’t occur until the end of the film). Also, none of the deaths are excessive and are extremely plausible given the film takes place in a summer camp. Thus, I continued to watch, now fascinated that I might have prematurely judged this work yet, admittedly, unable to get the now disproportionate characterization Aunt Martha out of my mind. Also, the manner in which Angela is cast and characterized as the silent, mentally inept child allowed me to continue to hold firm to my reservations but, unbeknownst to me, Hiltzik had me firmly in his grip.
Three-quarters through the film, a dream sequence arises which seems to come out of nowhere and it honestly threw me for a loop because I didn’t know if it was a sad precursor to the director feeling he was losing control of the plot and had nowhere else to go or if I was being subtlety teased. I went with the former, quite honestly, because of the manner in which the scenes were shot atop knowing the genre and budget involved. However, if I would have listened more closely, I could have heard Hiltzik laughing in the background.
Now, I felt a bit naïve and foolish when the jaw dropping finale presented itself in the final scene. I thought perhaps I was a bit tired when I watched the movie. The thrill was, I would suspect, due in part to the clichéd subgenre which the film finds itself. However, after going back through various reviews of the film, I didn’t feel as foolish because there seems to be a consensus that the film rises above and beyond its peers and that, when a twist ending is used in low budget horror film in an area that has long since been parodied to death, we expect such an action on the director’s behalf to be trite and a mere effort to salvage an otherwise putrid movie. However, Hiltzik’s ending merely makes all the pieces, from the saturated acting of Aunt Martha to the strange dream sequences that seemingly appeared without proper justification, come together while completely and satisfactorily closing the film with a scathing image which will remain in the audience’s mind long after the credits have rolled. (It doesn’t help that he freezes the final frame and holds it through the credits.)
I don’t think the film would be unjustly praised if I compared it to Scream in the respect that the directors of both films knew the genre and its audience (and their expectations) so well before deciding to explore what hadn’t been done in an attempt to give their viewers something for their time and money.
Also, perhaps out of a wry sense of humor, the movie is dedicated to director’s mother. I feel perhaps this is sincere because if Sleepaway Camp was dedicated to the director’s aunt, I would then had to have tipped my hat even more. Also, a nod goes to Edward French, who was responsible for the special effects of this film. He did a great job constraining himself at a time when the field permitted artists to indulge without having to bother too much with the realism of the visuals in relation to the events which proceeded them on screen.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
