Summertime Slasher Time
This month, a Dark Narratives look at the horror history of sleepaway camp
Summer is officially upon us here in New Mexico. You can tell by the quantity of smoke pluming up from all the wildfires, and the oppressive dry heat that blasts your face every time you step outside. But there’s some beauty to summer, too. Some magic, even. Turn your face toward the warmth and the light, friends, and never mind whatever is moving around the shadows behind you.
We’ll dig in to some summer-drenched horror shortly…but first, a few announcements!
This month’s Gumroad guide is all about Voice! What it is, how to find yours, and some insights from the voice-chameleon world of copywriting: https://tlbodine.gumroad.com/l/kjovc
Pre-Orders are available for Brutal Hearts by Cassie Daley (spooky rainbow goth queen herself), a 90s retro-horror about a disappearance, a search for closure, and some things going bump in the night: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1229401370/pre-order-brutal-hearts-paperback-90s
Tom Deady’s newest release Of Men and Monsters, out by Crystal lake Publishing, looks like some perfect summer reading: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095295SZV
Speaking of monsters, don’t forget to pre-order your copy of Human Monsters, a 35-story anthology from Dark Matter Magazine, edited by Sadie Hartmann: https://darkmattermagazine.shop/collections/books/products/dark-matter-presents-human-monsters
Nightlight Podcast is accepting story submissions from Black horror authors all summer long: https://nightlightpod.com/submissions/
Wattpad’s annual writing contest The Wattys opens for entry in July, so get your stories polished now! https://www.wattpad.com/wattys/?utm_source=wattpad&utm_medium=wp_hfc&utm_campaign=wattys2022
Summer camp. An idyllic getaway for young people. A chance to socialize, practice arts and crafts, go hiking, sing campfire songs, and be brutally murdered by a crazed bloodsoaked killer in the dead of night.
Oh, wait, what was that last one?
Few images from horror media are quite as iconic as a murderer slashing his way through teens at a camp. But why is that? Where did the idea even come from to begin with, and why do people enjoy watching it so much?
To understand that, we need to take a little journey through history…
The Origin of Summer Sleepaway Camp
The first summer camps were opened in the 1870s and 1880s as a direct response to the increased urbanization of a post-industrial society. They were originally targeted to boys, and the purpose was to "build character" and save young boys from going soft from modern conveniences. This idea was spurred along by psychologist G. Stanley Hall's theories of human development, which argued that children develop along the same general route as humanity through history -- in other words, that kids need to pass through a wild, undomesticated caveman stage before they can become civilized.
Hall's theories were pretty bonkers, but the summer camp idea stayed popular, even as their commitment to wilderness survival softened. Camps for girls in the 1920s and 30s started cropping up to push back against Flapper culture, teaching girls traditional domestic skills. In the 1940s, summer camp was viewed as an opportunity to physically train boys so they'd be better soldiers when their time came for war. Other war-time campers tended to food gardens to help with the war effort.
Post-war, camps remained popular but exploded in diversity and purpose. There are academic camps designed to provide educational programming in various different disciplined. Sports camps for every team sport you can think of. Church camps for teen Bible study. There are 15,000 summer camps in the United States servicing 26 million kids and earning about $21 billion a year (or, anyway, before Covid. The plague kind of disrupted that).
A lot of "camps" now are more like summer school programs or educational daycare settings, in the sense that kids don't stay overnight. These day camps are cheaper and, perhaps, a bit easier for anxious parents to swallow. After all, sending your kid away to the care of strangers for several days or weeks is pretty scary. Who knows what could happen to your children while under someone else's watch?
A Setting for Slaughter
The oldest “summer camp murder” slasher I can find is Friday the 13th. Released in 1980, this film picked up on the snowballing popularity of slashers in general (Black Christmas, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and introduced a new element in the form of the summer camp. Just as Halloween was the “babysitter murder” movie, Friday the 13th became the “camp counselor murder” movie.
The plot, if you’re unfamiliar: A drowning accident and murder lead to the shut-down of Camp Crystal lake, but it's reopened some time later. A group of camp counselors arrive early to start getting the place set up (which mostly involves them goofing off and hooking up), but they're picked off and murdered one by one. We discover (spoiler alert?) that the killer is Pamela Voorhees -- the mother of the boy who drowned in the lake, and who now holds a grudge against camp counselors because they let her son Jason die on their watch (being too busy having sex, as teen camp counselors do).
The film performed well and spawned a 13-installment franchise, with subsequent films starring the supernaturally resurrected, silent, super-powered, mask-wearing, machete-wielding Jason Voorhees himself. A lot of the “sex = death” and “final girl purity” stereotypes of slashers originate in the Friday the 13th franchise and its imitators (of which there are many).
But if this movie is the first of its kind, where did it come from?
Sean Cunningham (the film's director) set out to independently make a film that would tap into the success of Halloween (which had come out two years prior). His scriptwriter Victor Miller started with a different working title, "A Long Night at Camp Blood," but Cunningham thought the shorter and more enigmatic "Friday the 13th" would work better (and probably link up with Halloween and Black Christmas, which obviously both evoke specific days of the year). The idea of making a franchise was engineered to attract teenagers to the theater each year for each new installment -- a calculated marketing move.
A lot of the plot formula is practically identical to Halloween. But the setting -- the summer camp -- was unique, and caught imaginations by storm. And I don’t think that was coincidental.
Play-Acting at Adulthood
A common feature among most summer camp media is the presence of teenage camp counselors. In real life, counselors are more commonly adults (and often trained as educators, coaches, etc.), but teens aren’t unheard of in the role by any means.
This idea of 16-18 year-olds assuming the mantle of responsibility for a crew of younger kids away from home is like thematic catnip for the horror genre. In this, it shares a lot of ground with that other beloved horror movie trope and subject of urban legend: The Babysitter.
Babysitters and camp counselors alike are teens thrust into an adult role. They’re children themselves, but they’re responsible for younger children — and what they do with that responsibility speaks not just to their character, but as a reflection of the societal values around them.
There are several salient points to consider.
First: The existence of childcare already suggests that something has gone wrong in the natural order of things. Parents are shirking their responsibilities as caregivers and leaving the job in the hands of untrained children — and when something awful happens to the children in question, well, surely that’s the parent’s fault. Through this lens, the murderous mayhem committed at summer camp is a reflection of parental insecurity and guilty conscience.
Second: For a teenager to be a counselor, they must first be a teenager, which itself presupposes the existence of teenagers. That sounds like a no-brainer until you realize how new the social identity of “teenager” actually is. For most of human history, youth blended pretty seamlessly into adulthood. But after the Industrial Revolution, when compulsory education became more popular (to keep kids from a hard life of toil), we start seeing kids spending a lot of time together, developing their own social structures independent of adults. Add to that burgeoning wealth, smaller family sizes, and technological advancements like cars and cell phones, and suddenly teens exist as a group with some mix of autonomy and foolishness. They’re old enough to get in trouble, but too inexperienced to get out of it. Their developing brains urge them to take risks, and a society that trusts them with responsibilities fails to shield them from those risks.
Through that lens, the slasher’s insistence on carving up the youth gains an interesting dimension. Are these films cautionary tales about our failure to protect young people from the dangers of adult responsibilities? or are they wish fulfilment stories about putting these socially ambitious upstarts in their place, lest they threaten adult civilization?
Both, I think. Kind of both.
The Truth Stranger Than Fiction
In 1977 (just three years before Friday the 13th came out), a tragic and horrific event occurred at Camp Scott in Mayes County, Oklahoma. The first night of camp, three girls — Lori Farmer, Michelle Guse, and Doris Milner — were found raped and murdered. Chillingly, the attacks were apparently premeditated: A note reading “We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one” and signed “The Killer” had been found months prior, and discarded as a joke.
The suspect, found camped out in a nearby cave, was Gene Leroy Hart. He’d previously been convicted of rape and kidnapping and had escaped jail in 1973. A member of the Cherokee tribe, he'd been hiding out with other Tribe members in the intervening years. The trial failed to convince a jury, though, and he was acquitted. He died of a heart attack a couple of years later. Another suspect, convicted rapist William Stevens, was seen lurking around camp grounds a few days before as well, and an inmate named Karl Lee Myers reportedly confessed to the killings to his prison cellmate. DNA evidence, examined years later, seems to support the story of Hart's guilt, but it's not fully conclusive, and the murders remain unsolved.
Camp Scott -- which had been in operation since the 1920s -- shut down after the murders and has never reopened. It is reportedly haunted, though, and paranormal enthusiasts and ghost-hunters like to frequent it in search of paranormal activity.
I've never seen anyone say that Friday the 13th was inspired by this murder, but I can't help but think it would still have been fresh in the public's minds a few years later. And imaginations, fueled by the terror of real-world horrors, sometimes latch on to the release of fictional fears instead.
Summer Slashers: A Primer
If you’d like to trace the development of the summer slasher, or if you’re just in the mood for a blood-soaked popcorn flick to celebrate the warm weather, you’ve got a lot of horror history to choose from!
Obviously, Friday the 13th (1980) and its many sequels is top of the list. There’s also Sleepaway Camp (1983) and its sequels. Between those two were The Burning (1981) and Madman (1982), both inspired by the urban legend of Cropsy (and perhaps tapping into the rela-world anxiety of an escaped convict lurking around and murdering campers).
1987's Twisted Nightmare is a supernatural slasher about a group of young people who return to a camp they attended as kids, only to be murdered one by one. That same year, Summer Camp Nightmare takes more of a kids-gone-feral Lord of the Flies approach to the subject matter. Cheerleader Camp (1988) is about exactly what you'd think it is.
Camp slashers died down throughout the 90s, then started to re-emerge mostly as nostalgia cash-ins and post-Scream slasher subversions in the 2000s.
Bloody Murder (2000) is a blatant Friday the 13th knockoff, featuring a masked killer (this time with a chainsaw rather than a machete). Camp Slaughter (2005) is similar, but at least tries to freshen things up with a couple of twists and some time travel.
Stage Fright (2014) is a horror-comedy musical about murders at a musical theater camp. Summer Camp (2015) flips the script by having Americans travel to Europe as camp counselors, only to be confronted by a rage-zombie virus spreading from wilderness to campers. The Final Girls (2015) goes full meta, following a group of teenagers who are transported into an 80s-era slasher movie. Speaking of meta, there's also You Might Be the Killer (2018), based on an idea from Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes.
American Horror Story: 1984 (2019) also cashes in on that summertime serial killer nostalgia, as does the Fear Street: 1978 (2021) installment.
ADDITIONAL READING:
https://dailyhistory.org/What_is_the_history_of_summer_camps_in_the_United_States
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/02/brief-history-teenagers/
https://www.ranker.com/list/oklahoma-girl-scout-murders/cat-mcauliffe
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, why not share it with a friend?
If you REALLY enjoyed this post, consider joining my Patreon. Patrons see my posts a week before anyone else, and they vote on future topics. It’s a great way to support my content and helps me keep making things that y’all want to read.