Enbytion Transcendance : Sleepaway Camp

TW of the film: transphobia, implied homophobia, sexism, attempted sexual assault by an adult on a child, rape, murder, drowning, dead bodies, fatal accident, bees, severe burns, grief and death of loved ones
CW: blood, pain, nudity, harassment, violence towards children and adults alike

This second piece in the Enbytion Transcendence series is about one of the first films with a trans character that I have seen and wanted to analyse. Cult in the United States and popular with horror fans, the first feature film in the Sleepaway Camp franchise does not hold the same status in the French-speaking world, to my deep chagrin. Especially since this film is mainly promoted, not for its complex representation of a trans teenager in the 80s, but for the impact of its final twist, a concentrate of the transmisogyny of the time. This is why this text is less an umpteenth review than an introduction to the film and a collection of thoughts and theories about Angela Baker, the heroine of the franchise.

Directed and written by Robert Hiltzik for his debut in 1983, this film is a low-budget American slasher, whose premise is inspired by Friday the 13th before departing from it to my great pleasure.

The plot follows the arrival of Angela, an orphaned teenager along with her cousin Ricky, at a summer camp. Traumatized after a boating accident in which her father and father-in-law died, she remains mute and faces physical, verbal and sexual harassment from the camp leaders and the other kids, especially the opinionated Judy. However, far from remaining passive, she kills one after the other her numerous aggressors during murders as burlesque as terrifying. After having saved her cousin and accomplished her revenge, Angela is found by two camp monitors on the beach, naked, bloody and rocking the decapitated head of Paul, a lover punished for his infidelity and transphobia. But the scene doesn’t end there, as the director uses flashbacks and close-ups of the teenager’s penis to make us realize that Angela was once called Peter and was coerced by her abusive aunt to take on the identity of her sister, who died at the beginning of the film. Dehumanizing grunts, screams from the cisgender characters. The END.

Despite my fondness for the slasher sub-genre, the ridiculous 80s outfits as well as the improbable dialogues and the situations as vulgar as they are bloody that punctuate the story, I cannot close my eyes to the negative representations that the film carries. Especially since the cult status of the film is born from its extremely transphobic ending, which has delighted generations of moviegoers with the shock of the double revelation, regardless of the deleterious messages conveyed about a very marginalized and vulnerable community, then and now. In France, even today, the aspect most put forward by many critics, to sell the film is its ending described as nightmarish and shocking. Certainly, the device used to depict Angela naked at the end of the film, namely a naked cis adult man wearing a cast of actress Felissa Rose’s face, produces an unsettling sense of strangeness. But if I am upset it is not by the mere possibility of a young girl having a penis, it is because the image that is retained of this shy young person whom I have grown attached to, and whom I equally appreciate as a misunderstood vigilante, is from the last scene of that movie.

This image has a history and is shaped both by its time (cultural) and the unconscious imagery that follows, in the case of the director, that raising a child in a gender that doesn’t fit them would turn them into a serial killer with a psychological disorder. In addition, that imagery has contributed to the demonization of trans women in the media and to the portrayal of trans women, in the tradition of Dressed to Kill (1980), as murderers who are dangerous to cis women because they rape, kill and “steal” their cis partners. While this is, with some nuances, what happens in the movie, the characterization and attachment one feels for Angela, prevents her from being relegated to the ranks of characters detrimental to real life transpeople.

Yet, Sleepaway Camp was a personal favorite (minus the last five minutes, filmed to shock cisgender viewers with the brutality of this portrayal). So how can I explain my desire to rehabilitate the aura of this work and that of its protagonist, contrary to those who refuse to support it because of its graphic elements?

First of all, it’s because I believe that Angela’s character can inspire and resonate with many of my trans peers through shared experiences.

In my case, although I am not a trans girl like Angela, I am also concerned with transness, which is why the twist did not only upset me but also hurt me like so many others. Maybe it’s just my interpretation of it, but if I felt so betrayed by it, it’s also because the identification I had created with the protagonist during one hour was shattered, destroying at the same time all the questions of identity that had been built up until then. But after several nights (months) of reflection, I finally realized that presenting the heroine in this way was still consistent with her time, with my analysis that follows, and also with the main point of the film, namely that forcing a dysphoric person into a gender that is not their own will undermine their mental health and thus is dangerous for that person, rather than for the others, as this and so many other films suggest. Critic BJ Colangelo discusses it further in this article.

Second, because once I got past the transphobic aspects of the film, I became aware that it had much more to offer and that even in works that are even more unsympathetic to their queer characters, there are still encouraging elements to be highlighted. The cathartic power of the murders, for example, shifts the film’s genre from slasher to rape-and-revenge, to ensure a sense of rooting for Angela by presenting her not as an executioner but as an active victim. According to critic Aspen Nelson, it would not be enough to make the protagonist a trans icon, like the cis women serving justice in the same sub-genre. Yet viewers are eager to see the heroine triumph and not pay for her crimes, most of which are minimized by being shown off-screen until the bodies are discovered. They can be even happier that she doesn’t succumb in a final confrontation, since she can be seen in other films of the franchise.

Since this film has the ability to spark such a debate around representations considered problematic and hurtful by some but groundbreaking by others, it fits in with the canon of works that have been re-evaluated over the past few decades, whose marginalized characters were once laughable or frightening. Now acknowledged for their early focus on characters belonging to marginalized communities, these works remain nevertheless secondary to some contemporary productions, which present these characters as belonging to interchangeable minorities, without delving into their specificities and the causes of their inequalities. This is why, as long as an active re-appropriation of texts, art and media pieces and terms used against us in the past has not been achieved, our personal construction will lack a history to understand our predecessors and on which to construct. A history indeed imperfect and often disgusting, which nevertheless has shaped our past and is ours to inscribe in our future.

And so, while Angela Baker faces many legit protests, she is on her way to achieving the same status as other pop culture characters who have experienced a resurgence, thanks to their re-evaluation by fans, who the film should have appealed to in the first place. As Rowan Ellis explains in her video about Jennifer Check, the anti-heroine of Jennifer’s Body, the success of these figures stems from the recent improvement in the representation of discriminated individuals (LGBTQ+, BIPOC, disabled, fat…), which allows marginalized viewers themselves to appreciate characters who are no longer only sympathetic and positive, but also complex and more tortured, opening up a vast field of possibilities to represent nuanced identities.

At the time, what we might have been looking for was something that was less complicated, less toxic, less dark. With a lot of elements of representation, what will normally happen is you have a marginalized group which is portrayed like actively badly initially and then you get something which is a little bit more like virtue signaling, it’s that character who is probably always going to be really good, just and moral, because you’re afraid of doing anything that would shine a bad light on them. Then you get to the point where you have enough of this positive representation that you can start to be a little bit more complicated in the way that you portray them.

Rowan Ellis in Why Jennifer’s Body Flopped, Explained (hint: it’s sexism)

Now that the significance of Angela and the film have been discussed, let’s focus on the evolution of the protagonist in her quest for affirmation of her gender identity in the face of her ally-less environment. After more than 35 years of analysis, the interpretations have ended up opposing each other, so I have chosen a path that is specific to my feelings, but each one can of course perceive Angela in another way.

To me, the heroine’s trans identity is not only disclosed in the final scenes, but rather is implied throughout her experiences with love, friendship, and especially transmisogyny. Such is the case in one of the first scenes where we find Angela, eight years after the boating accident, in the clutches of her aunt. Her abhorrent legal guardian seems more overacting than abusive here, even though she refuses to allow her children (Ricky and Angela) to be medically examined by anyone other than her and insists on referring to Angela as “my little girl. In a much later flashback, the then 5-year-old child is taken in by this same aunt who, in order to overcome her frustration at not having had a daughter because her husband left her and because she considers raising two boys to be too much, decides to give Angela feminine-coded clothing and rename her after her dead sister.

If I were to conclude here, Angela could still be seen as Peter, a young boy victimized by his aunt who has denied his identity for years and who finally breaks free by killing those who abused him. Regardless of her gender, the harassment, mockery, and dysphoria she faces acknowledged by the direction and dialogue, might have been all the same. However, the other accounts of her past as well as her relationships unveil a very different person. She is hated throughout the first third of the film because of her mere existence, without her having spoken or acted yet. Furthermore, the allusions to her body and discomfort become much more tangible when she is seen as a trans woman. Whether it’s the attempted sexual assault by the cook that reminds us of the prevalence of such crimes against trans women, the way that the group of young people view her as “other” and “different” from the moment she arrives, the violence when confronted with her muteness that can be seen as a metaphor for how cis people react to trans people they don’t understand, or even the name-calling, every scene screams at us that Angela is queer, and all we have to do is dig to realize it.

A particularly striking moment in this regard involves an argument between Angela and the camp bully, Judy. To grasp this, we have to go back to the description of Judy: Ricky and Paul already knew her because they had been together in previous years. She is older, has large breasts (bigger than Angela’s), is confident, believes herself to be superior because she hits on almost grown-up boys, and is contemptuous in every interaction with Angela. Yet this does not stop Angela from gazing at her endlessly, fascinated, and only looking away to chat with Paul. These gaze interplays, in my opinion, are a sign of love. But they are met with taunts about her appearance when Judy petty questions her about why she doesn’t shower with others. Willow Maclay, in the introduction to her article, discusses her body, her feelings as a trans woman and how Angela goes from martyr to monster because of that very body and the way it is portrayed. Moreover, the girl’s fixation on Judy, especially when she hits on young men, without feeling any envy for this ability, reveals Angela’s main interrogations: Do I want to be her/him or with her/him, regarding both Judy and Paul ? She questions here not only her romantic/sexual orientation but also her gender by appealing to her experience.

We can then see the double oppression that Angela is subjected to: the aforementioned transphobia but also misogyny, which are inseparable from each other to explain her journey. As Harmony Colangelo and other critics have pointed out, if Angela had been Peter, she would never have experienced such severe physical, sexual and emotional harassment and would have dealt with it less violently as a cis boy than as a trans girl. Angela’s confusion and discomfort is completely understandable because while her aunt has molded her to look like her version of a shy, desireless little girl, she is also expected to look like a cisgender girl and according to Judy, she is expected to go through puberty like the majority of cis teens, to be outgoing, to show her nakedness, to have her period. Even though as a trans out girl, she would be denied this very thing that she is forced to do. It thus becomes less of a mystery why Angela prefers murder to direct confrontation with her bullies, especially since she is leaving her home, another abusive environment, for the first time to go to camp, and nothing had prepared her until then to fight back and defend herself, especially when we know that she is not even respected at home.

The tipping point in gender awareness takes place this time between Paul and Angela, on the same beach where the last murder occurs, which marks the end of the young man’s life and the beginning of the protagonist’s. As far as Paul is concerned, he is the first young guy, who is not her cousin, to stand up for Angela and, above all, to talk to her in a friendly way and, at least at the beginning, to consider her as his equal and not as a trophy within a heterosexual relationship. During their first discussion, he tells her about his antics as if to a comrade, which leads her to utter her first words in days. However, this balance is upset when Paul kisses Angela twice without her consent. One could understand Angela’s confusion as modesty, inexperience with the awakening of her feelings or just disinterest, but I perceived her as hurt by this betrayal, which will not be the last.

During the course of their second meeting until the interrupted foreplay scene, new elements are interwoven. To begin with, the direction no longer places us from Angela’s point of view but from that of a potential aggressor, lurking in the shadows and coming up from behind. The protagonist is no longer in control and is presented as even more vulnerable than before. Yet, once we realize along with the young girl that it was only Paul, in other words, that we had been tricked by the film, we realize that Angela’s frail appearance and her worries about the killer at the camp in the face of Paul’s supposedly sincere feelings are certainly hiding the true intentions of the characters.

Therefore, while the two friends continue on the sand, their relationship has once again evolved. This time, as Paul kisses Angela, again without apparent consent, she pushes him away without appearing uncomfortable: flirting becomes a game. And that is until Paul drops his partner and, towering over her, begins to unbutton her shirt despite her protests. The dichotomy between boy and girl in this couple is this time very clear: Paul dominates, nothing should resist him because after all, it was Angela who turned him on. But here, the heroine refuses to remain passive and confronts several issues while her memories come back to her. If one considers the representation of the couple according to the protagonist, a resolutely modern conception emerges. Her father was gay, in a very loving relationship with a man named Lenny. A brief (and poorly filmed) scene of the couple in bed reveals that their children knew about it and that all was well in their family. Nevertheless, Angela was already feeling uneasy regarding her sister, the other Angela. But after the accident, Angela had to be adopted by her divorced, mischievous aunt, which no longer offered her any representation of a loving relationship.

When she pushes Paul away in shouting, it is a sign that she has formulated a response, which will be reinforced with the continuation of the events. By rejecting her friend, she affirms not only her refusal to be dominated, but also her impotence to become Peter again, even if she wanted to. She is and will remain Angela. Perhaps she rather contemplates a relationship with Judy but all her hopes are swept away when she surprises Paul and Judy kissing, after she has once again pushed back the former who repeated his advances. A coward, probably no longer finding any immediate interest in Angela, Paul does not even defend her anymore when Judy and Meg throw her into the water, a source of trauma for her. This last aggression leads these three young people to their loss during the most violent sequences: Meg has her back slashed, Judy is raped with a curling iron and then suffocated, and Paul is beheaded. Here we see a reinforcement of transmisogyny as Angela is brought to the same level as other serial killers using phallic weapons (knife, dagger, arrow) in addition to literally raping a teenage girl which labels her as a dangerous predator. At the same time, the avenger kills the camp leader, a figure of violent white cis-patriarchy, who was beating her cousin and only murders Paul after she has undressed and shown him her body. Although this particular sequence is implied, one can be satisfied to read it as a subversion of the Unsettling Gender Reveal trope, where a trans woman reveals to her partner that she is not cis and they (usually a straight cis man) reacts violently, sometimes even killing her. In the film, it is the cis partner who, because he is shocked or disgusted, is killed. Long live catharsis.

Thus, the end of the film can be seen as the liberation of Angela’s character. She killed half the campers, managed to protect Ricky and above all found out who she was. She is confirmed as a trans woman in the sequels, but it is her journey that allows viewers to see her as she is, which is why it is important to continue to write trans-related narratives for the characters. It is not contradictory that the following two opposing truths co-exist: just because Sleepaway Camp is a film made by and for people who had transphobic views in the 1980s does not mean that it cannot resonate today with our experiences as trans people.

I hope I could convince you to discover or give this film another shot, especially if you felt that there are no horror movies with a proud, trans heroine. Yet, it does, 35 years before Bit (2018), Angela was born to my utter delight.

• transmisogyny = term coined by Julia Serano as “ the intersection of transphobia and misogyny as experienced by trans women and transfeminine people”.

Originally published in French at http://constanceismann.wordpress.com on October 9, 2021.