Every fall I assemble an overambitious watchlist of a few dozen seasonally appropriate movies, a mix of highbrow horror antiques, low budget splatterfests, and autumnal prestige movies. What started as a pandemic-era way of passing the time while working remote and never leaving the house has transformed into a constantly evolving list of scary movies to watch with my wife in the weeks leading up to Halloween. 

From this annual tradition came a newfound fixation on the wave of trashy slashers that peaked in the 1980s, produced by amateur gorehounds hoping to replicate the successes of indie classics like “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” These are generally not very good movies, but endlessly watchable; it’s best to join the filmmakers in disregarding plot and character development, instead luxuriating in the margins of these lovingly made but formulaic, inept works of genre exploitation. 

Lesser-seen bangers like “Scream For Help,” gorgeously set against the woods of the Pacific Northwest, the satanic panic curio “Hack-O-Lantern,” featuring a party scene interrupted by a few breathless minutes of Comics Unleashed style material from comedian Bill Tucker, and the surprisingly overt feminist gem “Slumber Party Massacre,” offer plenty of nooks and crannies to explore beyond the expected sleazy thrills. 1983’s “Sleepaway Camp” is sort of the platonic ideal of post-Jason summer camp slashers and the richest text I’ve encountered during these yearly binges. An initial critical and commercial failure, it has since attracted a huge queer cult following, thanks to myriad campy performances from a parade of non-actors, borderline avant-garde flashbacks full of provocative gender stuff, and a legitimately shocking final image.

This piece is supposed to be about baseball, so I’m going to get to that now: the tension of the movie’s first proper kill scene is relieved by a three minute baseball sequence where the campers and counselors take on a rival camp. It’s a tonally bizarre concoction of lazy late summer vibes and hostile creative cursing, a bunch of 19-year-old men in crop tops and cutoff jean shorts screaming “asswipe” and “little wimp” at a gang of middle schoolers. 

What makes the scene truly memorable is how it just sort of keeps going, fading in and out across innings, making time for a series of weirdly tense arguments and character sketches, like a moment spent with a nerdy outfielder distracted by a primitive video game on his pocket calculator. One of the most iconic exchanges comes late in the game, when a counsellor from the other team enters the batter’s box red faced with spittle flying, tells our protagonist Ricky to “Eat shit and die.” Ricky quickly counters with an effortless KO: “Eat shit and live, Bill.”

Despite the surreal pacing and tonal insanity, the sequence offers a vision of young adolescence that still rings true: all cranked emotions and pointless reactivity, everyone flying off the handle to test their boundaries, safely dipping their toes into Reagan-era hypermasculinity. This extended detour through an all-male space defined by pointless competition and the vague, directionless rage of being a teenage boy goes beyond just a charming diversion. 

Beloved for its clumsy themes of gender performance and the confounding body horror of puberty, “Sleepaway Camp” is hardly a baseball movie but is certainly a movie enriched by its presence. What first seems like a lazy attempt at filling space between the good bits where various teenagers hook up and are shortly thereafter murdered ends up an essential part of the text.

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Baseball Issue Summer 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here. 

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