Summer Is For Baseball, Hot Dogs, And Watching A Bunch Of Horny Teens Get Murdered In The Woods

I spent 11 summers at sleepaway camp, first as a camper and then, once I turned 17, as a**** counselor. Every year around this time, I get nostalgic for the days that moved along to the soundtrack of 2000s pop and Dean Friedman songs, and the freedom of a world where the greatest authority is some guy in his early 30s named Neil whom everyone ignored. I have found only one solution to assuage my yearning for the blue skies and green hills of the Finger Lakes: watching movies where a bunch of teens living in cabins get absolutely slaughtered.

From Friday the 13th to watching the trailer for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on a loop until it's reached feature length—every era, every iteration, every final girl—I've seen probably every summer camp slasher at this point. I've seen Bruce Springsteen's little sister drown a girl in an outhouse (Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers). I've seen Sadie Sink get hacked up by an axe and then, in a miraculous testament to the powers of first-aid training, be resurrected through CPR (Fear Street Part Two: 1978). I’ve seen George Costanza as a horny teenager (The Burning), which was perhaps the most horrifying moment of them all.

I have lived a million of those classic, less harrowing slasher moments as well. I've smoked a joint in the woods before walking alone in the dark, climbed through an overgrown trail after midnight to a part of the camp that hadn't been used in decades, and been briefly stranded at night in the middle of a rural New York town after my friend's car broke down. I bought a picture of a random man at an antique store, to trick my campers into thinking he was a local ghost. I had a habit of sneaking out of my own tent to spend the night with my boyfriend, and sneaking back in the morning. Such is the beauty of summer camp: mix the freedom of self-discovery with the perils of minimal supervision. Put a bunch of horny teenagers in charge. Throw in a ghost story around a campfire, and you've got yourself a horror movie.