By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: writer and director Robert Hiltzik, who helmed the notorious 1983 cult slasher flick Sleepaway Camp.
As recently discussed in this column, the big, dark, creepy cinematic house that is the horror genre is cohabited by a large cohort of Unsung Auteurs, largely due to the fact that said big, dark, creepy cinematic house sits way out on the outskirts of the cinematic landscape. As well as under-celebrated horror filmmakers, the Unsung Auteurs column is also home to many creatives with only a very limited career resume, often due to the fact that their talents were largely ignored, making the mounting of new projects considerably more difficult for said creatives. In the form of under-praised writer/director Robert Hiltzik we have not just a horror filmmaker, but one with only two films to his credit. The first of those two films, however, is so singular, so influential, so creative, and so, well, good, that it instantly qualifies him for Unsung Auteur status. Robert Hiltzik is the creator of 1983’s slasher flick Sleepaway Camp, one of the greatest of the “summer camp” sub-genre of the eighties-essential slasher sub-genre.
Robert Hiltzik was born in 1957, and graduated from Williams College before continuing on to NYU’s Tisch School Of The Arts For Film, and eventually attending Hofstra University Law School. A driven and committed figure, Hiltzik hit the ground running as soon as he left film school, almost instantly raising the money to make his first feature film by enlisting big-name share partners like 7-Up and Miller Beer. With a completed script and $350,000, Hiltzik put together Sleepaway Camp, which was based in part on the director’s own experiences as a youngster at summer camp, a true American tradition and rite of passage. With 1980’s Friday The 13th and 1981’s The Burning setting something of a blood-smeared precedent, the inventive Robert Hiltzik shaped up to take a new approach to the summer camp slasher flick with his debut film.
“The idea was to do something different,” Robert Hiltzik told noted online Sleepaway Camp super-fan Jeff Hayes. “Instead of having all the counselors being murdered and doing all the killing, let the kids have some fun! I wanted to do something a little more interesting than just somebody running around with a knife stabbing people, and ya know, let the kids be kids…entertainment! Entertainment! I wanted to do a genre film with a little bit of money that would have the best chance of distribution. Comedies are very subjective, and dramas are dramas, but I figured with a horror movie we could do something interesting and that we would have a good chance of being picked up.”
The resulting film is almost akin to ground zero when it comes to its truly bizarre mix of gruesome horror, arch comedy, kinky camp, and wilful gender-bending, while its front-and-centre approach to adolescent bullying and teen trauma was somewhat ahead of its time. The plot is deceptively slash-and-stalk simple. Shy and introverted young teen Angela (the excellent Felissa Rose, who never really jumped to the heights she deserved) has had a traumatic childhood: her father and sibling were killed in a boating accident, and she has been raised by her eccentric Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould), along with her cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). When Angela and Ricky are sent to Camp Arawak for the summer, they are almost instantly set upon by an ugly mix of teen bullies, adult perverts and basic arseholes…and then the killings begin.
On paper, it’s pretty simple, yes, but it’s what Robert Hiltzik brings to Sleepaway Camp that makes this summer camp slasher flick so impressive. At times, the film almost feels like something akin to The Bad News Bears overlaid with a horror narrative, as a cast of age-appropriate actors (not the adults usually seen in teen-based horror films) cuss, curse and engage in all manner of bad behaviour. There is abundant, self-knowing, genre-literate humour aplenty (years before Scream), and an odd sense of free-floating weirdness throughout the entire film. Unlike most T&A-heavy slasher flicks, this movie’s guys also get around in skimpy gear, with a surprising array of midriff t-shirts and short, short, tight, tight, tight shorts, which gives the film a curiously homoerotic vibe. The kill-scenes are especially bizarre and sadistic (death by killer bees, anyone? How about a hot curling iron inserted, well, yeah…), and shock the audience even more when placed within the film’s comedic rhythms and next to its young cast. And then there’s, holy shit, the minor character of Aunt Martha, played with so much to-the-back-rows weirdness and theatricality by Desiree Gould that she wouldn’t look out of place in a John Waters freak-fest.
As anyone who has seen Sleepaway Camp will instantly attest, however, the film is really defined by its shock twist ending. Often credited as one of the best and most demented finales in horror movie history, and frequently compared to the chill inspired by the end of Psycho, the final moments of Sleepaway Camp indeed crystalise Hiltzik’s true sense of imagination and originality as a filmmaker. Minor spoiler ahead…okay…the ending has seen the merits and influence of Sleepaway Camp debated for many years, particularly in the trans community, with writer and horror fan members of said community arguing eloquently and intelligently both for and against the film. This debate has given Sleepaway Camp an undeniable sense of cache, but it has also seen the film kinda-sorta cancelled in some circles, while ensuring its enduring cult status at the same time.
Though a success upon its initial cinema release, Robert Hiltzik was for many years blissfully unaware of the cult that had grown around Sleepaway Camp, refocusing his energies instead on a law career and raising his family. Hiltzik had licensed the rights of his film away, resulting in three sequels that used some of his ideas from an initial script, but were made without Hiltzik and the original cast’s involvement: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988), Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) and the misbegotten, half-finished Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor (2012), which was released years after the fact.
After returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak, for a home entertainment audio commentary to accompany a new release of his cult favourite, Hiltzik returned to his franchise properly by writing and directing 2008’s straight-to-DVD effort Return To Sleepaway Camp. Ignoring the events of the previous sequels completely, featuring original cast members Felissa Rose and Jonathan Tiersten, and boasting the same brand of whacked out humour and narrative twistiness that had distinguished the first film, Return To Sleepaway Camp cemented Robert Hiltzik’s position as a truly twisted horror auteur. Sadly for horror fans, Hiltzik returned to creative hibernation after the release of his sequel, not making a film since…
For much, much more on Sleepaway Camp, you might like to track down Jeff Hayes’ book Sleepaway Camp: Making The Movie And Reigniting The Campfire.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
