Halloween, both the 1978 and the 2018 versions, are movies about the murderer Michael Myers and his ruthless reign over the town of Haddonfield. In both movies, his primary target is Laurie Strode as she is a teenager in the 1978 film and then an adult in the 2018 version. Sleepaway Camp is a movie about murders that take place at a summer camp and the victims seem to be the bullies of a girl named Angela. However, the twist at the end reveals that the real Angela died and her brother, Peter, was raised as Angela and that he was the one who committed the murders.
Slasher films are my personal favorite kind of horror movie as they are the type that I think could be the most plausible. After growing up on the real-life tales of serial killers like Ted Bundy, it is entirely possible that killers like Michael Myers are walking among us, which makes these types of movies all the more terrifying. I think one of the most fascinating aspects of this trope is the serial killers who kill for seemingly no reason. In Halloween (1978), Michael kills his sister for no reason and then goes on to commit his reign of terror. Murray Leeder says this is exactly what makes the audience so terrified of him as Michael “is frightening precisely because he is unmotivated, inexplicable, and unstoppable” (2). If there were a killer on the loose who kills randomly for no reason, then there would be a mass panic.
The idea of male masochism is easily seen within Sleepaway Camp. In the article written by Barbara Creed, she discusses that masochism comes in three forms “erotogenic, moral, and feminine” (119). Within the movie, we can see Angela falls victim to both erotogenic and feminine types of masochism. Chiefly, it is to be assumed that she derives pleasure from the pain of being humiliated by her peers. She is able to take that pain and turning it to pleasure by killing those who gave her the pain. However, by going along with her aunt’s plan of acting like a female when she is actually a male shows show she revels in the feminine type of masochism.
Furthermore, I think that Sleepaway Camp also dives into the idea of control and how when somebody loses control in one area of their life, that they tend to fight to make up for it in another area. This can be seen with Angela as she had her identity stripped away from her by her aunt. Instead of getting to live a life as a normal boy, she was forced to become this ideal daughter that her aunt wanted. Going to camp was an excuse for Angela to break out of the confines of what her aunt made her be and took back control. When she was being bullied by other kids, she was able to take the control out of her hands and murder them in some act of justice.