Sleepaway Camp

The most interesting thing about Sleepaway Camp, as I'm sure anyone who's seen it would agree, is the ending. But a lot of how effective the ending is has to do with the rest of the movie, and especially the tone. There's not a lot of sudden violence, even in the most directly presented murder scene--the sexy/snotty counselor getting stabbed in the shower. Instead, the movie mostly opts for a kind of subdued ambient feel, beginning with the slow tracking shots across the empty playgrounds, and most memorably (in my mind) the really excellently well done long shot of all the kids arriving at the camp, the huge pan from left, across the three buses, with the kids streaming across the shot as it pans right and down into the camp, the loud camp-director guy standing in the middle and shouting--but even here obviously not "acting," at least in any competent sense. The "classical" score adds to this part of the tone.

I'm not sure what to make of the bad acting as far as how it serves to help the movie--and maybe it just doesn't. No one has a boring performance, though. There are no flat line readings. But pretty much nobody here is in any sense a "good" actor. Certainly that works for the kids, who are all appropriately aged, and so their inability to actually act always reminds us that these are obviously real teenagers, quite often behaving exactly how "real" teenagers would behave at a camp like this. It's probably less effective, though, with the older "actors," who all seem to be at least trying to "act" in a way that only makes the viewer aware of how bad they are at acting. Sometimes it's quite funny, this way, but I don't think it really adds to the movie the way the non-performances of the kids and most of the counselors does.

And I think it's important that the campers are all real kids because this is a summer camp slasher movie, and it is very obviously a summer camp slasher movie, by which I mean that is not trying to be anything else (which seems important to me), and the viewer is likely (almost certainly) aware of certain expectations for this type of film--which almost certainly include sex being had by the campers, and of course nudity. But here, because the performers are kids, the viewers expectation of this, and more especially the viewers obligatory desire for this, is thwarted--nobody actually wants to (want to) see real naked teenagers. So the movie sets up a little bit of disgust for the viewer to direct toward him/herself, since we're trained to want the voyeuristic thrill of nudity in movies like this, but we're constantly being reminded that this would be a genuinely perverse desire in the case of this film.

So there's already this seed of frustration and disgust throughout the movie--which, I should add, is quite often actually really well done, especially the "good old summer camp" scenes with the boys horsing around, playing baseball, etc, but when it veers back into the set forms of slasher movie the viewer can't help but be a little uncomfortable about it. And then there's the big "shock" at the end, which is genuinely pretty shocking--but I think the most shocking thing about it is that it is suddenly so absolutely tasteless. There's at once this "shock" of the narrative "twist" that's completely dwarfed by the shock of how blatantly tasteless the actual reveal itself is. ... I'm not quite sure exactly how to express this. I think it's extremely interesting that the shock you feel at the end of the movie is really more about feeling disgusted at the movie itself, not actually a shock within the narrative of the movie. And that it's very specifically disgust at the tastelessness of it. But it's somehow not, I think, "anger" or anything like that being felt toward the fimmakers. You don't think they're jerks, or monsters, or something. Maybe crude... But it seems so intentional, and not sophomoric, so it's not even being let down by them. ... I think it's incredibly effective, and I think it's interesting that they're using this provoked reaction of disgust toward the movie itself as a way to slam home the ending... And of course there's also probably something about how the ending is finally nudity, but it's shocking male/ambiguous nudity that you don't get to enjoy at all. ... But it's not emotion the way you normally expect to feel emotion in watching a movie--it's not at all cathartic. It's not an emotional response directed toward or even projected from within the narrative of the movie, which is I think how emotion almost always works in movies. It instead provokes an emotional response in you, the viewer, directed not inside the movie but at the movie itself. ((And I think part of what's been interesting me so much about horror movies lately is that horror movies often are looking to provoke something more like this kind of emotional response, a response of viewer at movie rather than viewer within movie, or a kind of actual physiological response that isn't purely emotional, but I think that even in horror movies it's often still tied to the narrative of the movie, and it's nearly always perfectly cathartic, even at it's most tasteless.))