by Matthew Crump, Staff Writer

In honor of the new summer issue of Movie Jawn’s print zine, I’m going to expand on my new article examining the gender issues at play in the original Sleepaway Camp to include some memorable moments from the larger franchise. In preparation for the article, I sat down and watched all 5 of the Sleepaway Camp films (yes, even the one that’s just a kill compilation smacked together with 15 minutes of unedited new footage), and along the way I witnessed 57 murders, all with varying degrees of quality.

So I’ve done the laborious work of chiseling down the best kills from the franchise to save you the trouble! Whether you’re already a fan of the movies or are just starting to think about diving in, give this listicle a read for a taste of some summer camp terror! But proceed with caution– while I tried as best as I could to avoid spoilers, a few of them were simply inevitable.

13. The Speedboat that Started It All - Sleepaway Camp

This set of kills is perhaps the campiest opening to any slasher movie ever— in every meaning of the word. The tiny swimsuits, prankster kiddos, teens driving without a boating license, blood-curdling screams, zoom onto a dramatic gasp, and the fact that these teenagers are so dumb and two-dimensional that they are driving directly to shore. It’s admittedly a pretty clumsy foundation to build an entire film franchise on, but it gave us a series that we all love to hate, so for that it earns the right to open up this countdown to Sleepaway Camp’s best kills.

12. Putting the “Power” in Powerdrill - Unhappy Campers

Five years later, after a change in director and allocation of a larger budget, Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers is almost unrecognizable from the first. If film sequels are supposed to be sisters instead of twins, Unhappy Campers is a third cousin twice removed. Even so, the movie is self-aware enough that it earns merit badges entirely its own, one of which lies in the new quippy, chipper incarnation of the killer known as Angela.

In one of her earlier kills, Angela drives a camp counselor caught flashing her breasts (they love a boob shot in the sequels) to a remote area of the woods and starts fishing around in the back seat. “What are you looking for,” the counselor scoffs sarcastically, “a gun?” Angela finds what she’s actually looking for and brandishes it to the camera. “No, a drill.”

There’s nothing particularly glitzy or over-the-top about this kill but Pamela Springsteen’s delivery of the final line establishes exactly the kind of Freddy Krueger-esque dark humor the new era of Sleepaway Camp was setting out to achieve.

11. BDSM (but M is for Murder) - Teenage Wasteland

Filmed back-to-back with the sequel, Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland falls victim to the circumstance of a dwindling budget. For this reason, many of the kills were altered or cut out entirely to help pinch the pennies left for the special effects department.

Even so, a few kills remained unscathed here, one of which involves Angela tying up a boy who got a little too handsy with her to a tree under the pretense of experimenting with “bondage.” The boy goes all googly-eyed and neglects to notice that Angela is attaching the rope his arms are wound up in to the back of a pickup truck. One thing leads to another and pretty soon all you're left with is the torso of a teen who had to learn to keep his hands to himself the hard way.

10. Matilda’s Birdcage - Return

2008’s Return to Sleepaway Camp not only saw the highly anticipated return of the original director Robert Hiltzik, but it also gave us some of the worst over-the-top early 2000s slasher schlock in film history. Because of how uncomfortable, problematic, and, honestly, boring this movie is, I’d recommend it to almost no one. Every single teenager in this movie is so unlikeable but they only manage to kill like 5 of them somehow, some of which are just a regurgitated version of the previous films (ex: they recreate the tree bondage kill except this time it’s a fishing wire noose tied to a penis… I wish I was kidding).

However, despite the number of kills being far and few between, the sheer ridiculousness of them when they do happen does compel me to at least share them so you don’t have to sit through the rest of it. One of the better ones involves the head of the camp played by Vincent Pastore AKA Pussy from The Sopranos (and yes, a camper does call him a pussy in the movie), and his random obsession with his pet cockatoo, Matilda.

A mysterious cloaked killer sneaks up behind him and clasps Matilda’s birdcage around his head, leaving him in a position akin to the opening scene of Saw 2. Pretty soon, the door to the cage opens up and a garbage bag full of hungry rats comes scurrying in. I’d say you can imagine where it goes from there but I assure you, it goes much further than you’d like. Anyway, it’s a kill that not only is doing its absolute best to keep up with where horror was at in its current moment but also makes you wonder “what the fuck is wrong with Robert Hiltzik?”

9. Mowing the Lawn - Teenage Wasteland

All the kills up to this point, while certainly memorable enough to be worth mentioning, all come up short in making use of the camp setting they’re in– loaded up with all the random dangerous activities we allow pre-teens to do during their summers off under little to no adult supervision. Don’t worry, the rest of the list is about to change all that.

If it wasn’t enough to bury the head of the camp up to her neck in the pile of trash she’s been burying out back to skirt by on trash removal costs, Angela has the bright idea to make her death a little more fun and final with the use of a lawn mower. Even though Maximum Overdrive did it first, it’s nice to see Angela really make use of her summertime surroundings.

8. Stoned at the Teenage BBQ - Unhappy Campers

I’m a sucker for the dumb pothead character. While the two stoner sisters didn’t hang around nearly long enough, waking up to find yourself tied to a grill and face to face with the burnt crisp skeleton of your smoking buddy must have been quite a trip.

Return to Sleepaway Camp would try their own hand at this scene later on by tying the geeky theater kid from Gilmore Girls to a lawn chair, forcing gasoline down his throat, duck taping his mouth with a sign that says “drugs are for dummies,” and sticking a lit doobie into it so he literally explodes from the inside out. It’s incredibly intricate and stupid but I said I would tell you about the kills in that movie so you wouldn’t have to actually watch it. So this is me doing that.

7. Earning the Archery Badge - Sleepaway Camp

Making use of the bow and arrow practice range might seem obvious, but the technical execution of it is something to be marveled at. There are a lot of gruesome deaths in the original Sleepaway Camp, but some of the characters are so vile that an especially tight death sequence is required. This is the case of the creepy predator and original head of the camp, who Angela takes out mercilessly with an arrow through the neck. Hiltzik insisted the shot be continuous, requiring SFX artists Ed French and Bill Billowit to devise a spring-loaded mechanism that the dummy arrow would trigger the other half to shoot out the back of the neck. The shot is only a fraction of a second, but it still manages to be one of the film’s most effective kills.

6. Angela’s How-to Guide on Pitching a Tent - Teenage Wasteland

How can you have a camp slasher franchise and not get creative with some tents? The majority of Angela’s tent kills come from the third installation due to the camp leaders' insistence that the campers rough it in the woods without the comfort of the bunks. Angela uses the tents as makeshift burial grounds, even cremation chambers, but by far the best use of it is when Angela takes out the hostile inner-city rap lover “Riff” (don’t even get me started).

After spending the day inside his tent blasting music from his stereo and refusing to gut any fish, a tape plops onto his sleeping bag. Riff rolls over, pops in the tape, and is met with an original rap from Pamela Springsteen herself. Before he knows it, Riff is being beaten through the tarp above his head, and then, just to make sure he doesn’t make any sudden moves, Angela pitches a few extra stakes through his hands.

5. Teenage Boys Skin Frogs??? - Return

We top off our final 5 with the final murder of the franchise’s 5th installment. For Return to Sleepaway Camp, Hiltzik returned back to the whodunnit structure of the original, albeit with an extremely paper-thin “mystery.” Once the most obvious suspect is finally revealed, they also reveal that the older stepbrother/bully who had a penchant for skinning frogs alive (disgusting, but weirdly does feel like a thing a dumb early 2000s teen boy would do) is now lying a few feet away in the bushes having met the same fate at his amphibian victims. The movie might be kinda dumb, but that final kill is just gnarly enough to make it worthy of this list.

4. Bees in the Bathroom - Sleepaway Camp

One of the best kills in the original goes to the bully who viciously pelted Angela with a water balloon: Billy. While the rest of his team prepares for a baseball game, ol’ Bill tries to get a few minutes of privacy in the bunk’s bathroom stall. We see a broom slide in through the stall door handle, effectively locking him inside. Then a knife slices open the screen window above the toilet. Next, a stick with a strange gray mass slips through the hole in the window, just inches above Billy’s head.

By the time he realizes what’s happening, it’s too late. The angry beehive completely engulfs him, moments later giving us one of the most grisly shots and creative uses of special effects from the whole franchise: an upclose tracking shot of Billy’s lifeless corpse with bees crawling all over his welted body.

3. Flying at Half Mast - Teenage Wasteland

While Teenage Wasteland did struggle to fund all the elaborate kills they had slated, there’s one particularly effective one that was just simple enough to make the cut. After spending the entire first hour of the movie establishing the valley girl character as a deplorable racist, she finally gets hers when Angela walks her to the center of camp on a blindfolded trust exercise.

With total ease and casualness, Angela leads Cindy (of course her name is Cindy) up to the camp flagpole and intertwines the rope together with the one already tying her hands behind her back. Once Angela starts to pull her up, Cindy demands to know why she’s doing this, to which Angela cites some crystal clear evidence, saying, “Because you're a cheerleader, a fornicator, a drug taker, a nasty snotty bigot, and, besides that, you're real nice.”

This kill uses the camp setting to its advantage in a way that I’ve personally never seen before, and shows Cindy’s drop right up to the millisecond her body thuds to the ground, making it nearly impossible not to reflexively cover your eyes.

2. The Outhouse of Doom - Unhappy Campers

The best kills have to be reserved for the worst characters, and Ally is by far the worst character from Unhappy Campers. After spending the entire movie flashing boys, butting heads with Angela, and bullying the goody-two-shoes main protagonist, Angela finally corners Ally into an outhouse in perhaps the grossest, most fun kills I’ve ever seen in American slasher cinema. With this one you really get to see the new and improved Angela in full form, as evidenced in this exchange from Ally’s last, dirty moments:

“What's down there? …Answer me!”

“Shit!”

“That's right, one of your favorite words. Do you mind if I borrow it for a moment? You've been a shitty friend and a shitty camper. What else is down there? …Answer me!”

“Piss!”

“You've pissed away your good looks and God-given talent your whole life and turned it into nothing but a cynical dirty mouth waste of flesh! What else is down there?”

“I dunno!”

“Well, then, I guess you're just going to have to climb in and find out.”

This is screenwriting at its very finest. After shoving Ally down into the toilet and poking her back down with a stick until she drowns, Angela walks out of the outhouse, wipes her brow, and says simply, “You should’ve been the first to go.”

1. Curl Up and Die - Sleepaway Camp

The number one kill of the entire franchise has got to go to the one that took down the original Queen Bee mean-girl camper herself, Judy. Her kill is one of the last ones in the original film, and boy is it a long time coming. Ironically, what makes Judy’s kill particularly special is the lack of special effects.

After sitting out of the camp social to stay back in her bunk and hook up with a boy, Judy eventually finds herself left alone doing her typical nightly routine of curling her hair. Suddenly, the bunk door bangs open, and silhouetted by the night is a shadowy figure. It creeps toward the bed, step by step until Judy looks up and gets pinned down by a hand, in a style that feels very much akin to noir or Giallo films. Meanwhile, the murderer’s free hand reaches for Judy’s steaming hot curling iron and begins inching it toward her nether regions. From there, all we see is the shadow of a hand thrusting the iron up and down and Judy’s dying screams, but that shadow is just enough to let the imagination fill in the rest.

Honorable Mention

Of the remaining 44 kills from the franchise, there’s one that must be mentioned, and that’s Angela’s very first attempt at murder with the pedophilic camp cook, Artie. While standing on a chair tossing corn into a massive vat of boiling water, Angela strategically kicks the chair out from under him so he pulls the pot over on his way down. It’s simply impossible not to squirm while watching his skin boil and burst. Now, the reason Artie isn’t included on the actual list is, unfortunately, Angela’s attempted murder was unsuccessful, therefore it forfeits on a technicality.

Nevertheless, the scene marks the first real chance for the special effects department to shine and it does a great job of immediately setting the film apart from the typical b-horror movie that it’s looking like up to that point. The intensity and gruesomeness that Bill Billowit and Ed French are able to accomplish with this low-budget slasher is perhaps the biggest element of what makes this weird little movie so memorable, and certainly a part of why the series is still alive and well 40 years later.

I’ve done my best to refrain from showing anything too graphic in honor of the SFX folk’s hard work and the interest of your stomach. But if you’ve made it this far and still don’t understand what makes Sleepaway Camp so special, then I think it’s time you see for yourself:

Burn in hell, Artie.