‘Sleepaway Camp’ Was Kinda Heterophobic if You Think About It

Even if you’ve never seen the 1983 cult classic slasher film Sleepaway Camp, you’re likely familiar with its iconic images of male baseball jocks wearing crop tops and booty shorts. And you might already know its infamous twist ending. It’s almost impossible to talk about the film without spoiling its final moments, and it’s hard to imagine  the film would be remembered by anyone besides genre diehards without it.

Sleepaway Camp’s apparent final girl, Angela and the slasher that has been terrorizing Camp Arawak are one in the same. Angela also has a penis. We learn both truths at the same time. Two of the surviving camp counselors discover a naked Angela on a lakeside beach cradling the severed head of her former love interest, Paul. When caught, she stands naked and bloody, flashes the two an uncanny open mouth grin and utters an inhuman mix of groans and hisses. The final shots are admittedly unsettling, but this has very little to do with Angela’s genitalia. There is simply something inescapably eerie about Angela’s frozen-still body and her slack-jawed facial expression that appears both delighted and shocked at the idea of being caught. Director Robert Hiltzik’s staging and actress Felissa Rose’s physical performance create an instantly iconic horror image, and it’s hard to imagine that Sleepaway Camp, even with its gender reveal twist intact, would’ve been remembered at all without it.

Yet, Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp’s script doesn’t seem to be on the same page as his directing. Instead of reacting to the fact that Angela has transformed into a seemingly demonic creature who is covered in the blood of a decapitated teen boy, the characters are clearly more scared by Angela’s penis. “Oh my god, she’s a boy!” remarks Ronnie Angelo, one of the surviving camp counselors. Girldick is always the most terrifying thing imaginable.

This dissonance regarding queerness abounds in Sleepaway Camp. Despite anxiety about queer gender and sexuality playing a central role in the film’s overarching plot, it’s ultimately the cisgender and heterosexual society that the characters exist in that creates most of the film’s conflict. Sleepaway Camp is terrified of queerness and dangerously links gender dysphoria and internalized homophobia as precursors to violent psychopathy, but it’s also a movie that seems to despise straight people, whether that’s intentional or not.

You can trace this dichotomy back to the movie’s opening moments. Angela and her brother Peter join their father, John, and another man, Lenny, on a boating trip on a nearby lake. While the film doesn’t make it immediately apparent, we eventually learn that John and Lenny are boyfriends. Their briefly depicted interactions are casually kind, and Angela and Peter are clearly comfortable with Lenny’s presence on a family trip. For all its initial ambiguity, Sleepaway Camp opens with a healthy depiction of queer domesticity. But then a group of rough housing straight teens collide their motorboat into Angela’s family. John is killed and so is one of the two children while Lenny watches in horror from the shore. The surviving child is sent to live with John’s sister, Martha, and her son, Ricky, and Lenny disappears from the narrative.

I’m vague about this child’s identity because this is where a lot of the meat of Sleepaway Camp’s twist rests. It turns out the Angela we follow for much of the film isn’t the original Angela, who was killed in the prologue’s boating accident. Peter was the actual surviving child and Martha, a deeply deranged woman with some sort of vague medical degree, saw no point in being the guardian of two boys, purposefully raising Peter under the false identity of Angela ever since.

It’s for this reason that parsing Angela/Peter’s actual gender identity has been a subject of debate for over 40 years now. I’ve seen critics, cis and trans, come down on both sides of the debate. In the strictest of readings, Peter appears to have been a cisgender boy that was subjected to years of psychological manipulation and abuse until he accepted the identity of his deceased sister, a Norman Bates-style scenario but if his mother forcibly created his dissociative identity disorder. This reading is complicated by the fact that in Sleepaway Camp’s sequels, Angela continues to identify as a woman and is even implied to have undergone some form of medical transition. For what it’s worth, Angela’s actress Felissa Rose seems to believe that the character is genuinely trans, but it’s still a knotty thorny mess that’s impossible to really untangle.

Regardless, Sleepaway Camp clearly positions Angela’s (or Peter’s) gender as the catalyst for a violent psychosis that leads to her being a killer, which is potentially pushed over the edge by her burgeoning sexuality. Ricky’s friend Paul, the boy whom she will eventually decapitate, shows interest in her almost immediately after she arrives at Camp Arawak. His initial flirting is what finally gets her to break her shy, silent demeanor and speak for the first time in the film. Angela does genuinely seem to like Paul, and she responds to his initially innocent adolescent flirting with quiet appreciation and excitement. However, during their first kiss, Angela undergoes a strange dreamlike vision of her father and Lenny experiencing a tender moment in bed together, which is shocking enough to cause her to break away from Paul and run away into the night. The only reading of this that really makes sense in the context of the film is that Angela (or Peter, again it’s confusing) suffers from some form of internalized homophobia and was actually less comfortable with her father’s sexuality than initially appeared.

With the film’s twist in mind, Sleepaway Camp seems to want us to view this scene as a boy panicking over the idea of kissing another boy, but this also doesn’t really click with Angela’s characterization in the rest of the film. She seems to genuinely like Paul and is angered and heartbroken when he cheats on her with one of the more sexually open campers. So, is it internalized homophobia? Is Angela just still traumatized over the thought of her father’s death? There’s no real way of knowing. In order for the film to keep its big twist intact, Hiltzik never allows Angela to speak for herself. We are left to interpret through the few tools the text gives us, but the end result is roughly the same. Angela/Peter’s identity and history are inescapably wrapped up in queerness, and this is enough reason for her to turn into a serial killer.

Yet, even as Sleepaway Camp seemingly wants to vilify queer people, the actual events of the film say otherwise. Lenny and John’s relationship is never shown to be anything but loving and kind, which is in stark contrast to how its straight characters act and behave. The other campers, both boys and girls, quickly turn on Angela simply because of her quiet nature. While Ricky, who is unflappably loyal to his little cousin, is sometimes able to protect her from the harassment and abuse, he’s not always able to catch or overpower those that have made it their mission to other a girl they despise simply for being different. And sure, maybe Angela’s retaliations are exactly proportionate to her mistreatment, but you can hardly blame her for wanting some kind of revenge.

Paul’s rejection of Angela feels particularly damning considering his initial playful tenderness was such a welcome respite for her. Their courtship is the closest thing we get to a consensual romantic relationship depicted in the film, but it still goes sour as soon as Paul wants to push things farther physically than Angela is comfortable with. The fact that he almost immediately hooks up with one of Angela’s bullies is salt in the wound.

Multiple members of the camp staff are also shown to be sexual predators, including Angela’s first victim, the head cook Artie. Artie is first introduced leering at the underage girls who have flocked to camp, and he even attempts to rape Angela before she gets her revenge and pours a vat of kitchen grease on him. The camp’s owner, Mike, regularly sleeps with his employees and some of the older campers, including one of the girls who has made it her mission to torment Angela. He also almost immediately suspects Ricky of being the actual killer simply because of his adamant defense of Angela and even attempts to murder him after the body count rises.

Sleepaway Camp depicts heterosexual desire, particularly from men, as being predatory, transactional, cruel, and destructive. You can almost argue the film itself is at times sympathetic towards queer people for having to exist in a cishetero dominated society. Almost every step of Angela’s life has been violently impacted by the reckless desires of straight people. A straight couple’s behavior killed her father and sibling. Her presumably straight aunt’s shallow commodification of children’s genders robbed her of agency and identity. The straight campers bully her simply for being quiet and different. She’s almost raped by a straight member of the staff. Her straight boyfriend dumps her for daring to have boundaries about her body. And still, Sleepaway Camp insists it’s her proximity to queerness that is monstrous in the end. Witnessing her father in a loving relationship with another man haunts her, and the sight of her genitalia is more monstrous to the other characters than her actual acts of violence.

Watching Sleepaway Camp feels like witnessing someone on the verge of a breakthrough, putting together the right observations and criticisms but somehow still coming to the worst conclusion possible. It’s both a campy queer horror romp that’s ripe for reclamation but also inescapably harmful and damaging. Like other works of regressive patriarchal horror such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I hate Sleepaway Camp for what it says, but I’m still fascinated by it in equal measure. And yes, that last shot in all its transphobic glory, is still one of the most memorable conclusions to a slasher film in history.