1983 American slasher film
Sleepaway Camp is a 1983 American slasher film written and directed by Robert Hiltzik, and starring Mike Kellin (in his last on-screen appearance), Katherine Kamhi, and Paul DeAngelo alongside Jonathan Tiersten, Felissa Rose, Christopher Collet (in his film debut), and Karen Fields. The original entry in the Sleepaway Camp film series, it focuses on serial killings which occur at a summer camp for teenagers.
Filmed in upstate New York in the fall of 1982, Sleepaway Camp was released the following year by United Film Distributors. It earned approximately $11 million at the box office, but was met by largely unfavorable reviews from critics, many of whom deemed it exploitative and derivative of such films as Friday the 13th (1980).
In the years since its release, Sleepaway Camp has gone on to develop a cult following, a more positive reappraisal from critics, as well as garnering notoriety for its twist ending, which has been named as one of the most shocking and unforgettable in cinematic history.
It was followed by four sequels: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988), Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989), Return to Sleepaway Camp (2008) and Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor (2012).
Plot summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.