138 Children’s
Folklore
One of the earliest camp comedies,
Meatballs
(1979), features traditional
pranks and legends. Camp North Star’s head counselor Tripper Harrison (Bill
Murray) befriends an unpopular boy, Rudy, who has no talent for sports. After
Rudy wins a burping contest, he starts to feel better. Campers and counselors-
in-training (CITs) pull various pranks, including lighting firecrackers and put-
ting the camp director’s bed outdoors on Parents’ Day. One of the movie’s high
points is Tripper’s narration of “The Hook,” which ends with the lines “They
never found the killer. Some people say he’s
here in the woods, waiting for the
chance to kill again!” After that final line, Tripper pulls out a stainless steel hook
to frighten the campers.
A later camp comedy,
Heavyweights
(1995), begins with a chaotic school
scene: papers fly through the air. Gerry, the central character (Aaron Schwartz),
gets upset when his parents tell him he will be spending the summer at a camp
for overweight children. “It’s a fat camp!” he moans, but fellow campers reas-
sure him: “No one picks on you, because you’re not the fat kid.
Everyone’s
the fat
kid.” Folk traditions at this
camp include ghost stories, go-kart races, swims out
to a raft called “The Blob,” and spirited subversion of the “camp food only” rule.
Clever campers smuggle in salamis and other tasty snacks. Once the new camp
director (Ben Stiller) arrives, a tough regimen of exercise and humiliating rituals
makes the campers miserable. Against all odds, the campers defeat Camp MVP
in a three-part Apache Relay. After this encouraging win, a new camp director
takes charge, and life at the camp becomes pleasant again.
In contrast to camp comedies,
Friday the 13th
(1980)
portrays camp as a set-
ting for murder and mayhem. Since Jason Voorhees drowned at Camp Crystal
Lake, no camper or counselor can feel safe there. This film brings to mind ghost
and horror legends told by counselors to campers. In the second scene, campers
peacefully sing traditional camp songs; then a “sh-sh” sound announces a killer’s
approach. Two counselors kiss; the boy gets stabbed, and his girlfriend screams.
As in many legends, youthful sexual activity leads to death. An old man warns
the
current counselors, “I’m a messenger of God! You’re doomed if you stay here!”
After having sex, a young woman gets hit on the head with a hatchet. Besides
emphasizing how dangerous sexual involvement can be for the young,
Friday the
13th
presents murders in an intriguingly ambiguous context. Is the killer Jason,
who drowned in the late 1950s, or is it a living person with a grudge against
young people at the camp? As in many oral ghost stories, it is difficult to discern
the source of danger.
Shortly after the release of
Friday the 13th, Th
e Burning
(1981) gave viewers an-
other view of folk legends coming to life.
Some critics have dismissed
Th
e Burning
as a clone of
Friday the 13th,
but folklore and film scholar Mikel Koven recognizes
it as an important part of the folkloristic social script created by slasher films
(2008). Based on the “Cropsey Maniac” legend cycle documented by Lee Haring
Contexts 139
and Mark Breslerman in 1977,
Th
e Burning
begins with a counselor’s narration
of the Cropsey legend at Camp Blackfoot. A flashback reveals that the counselor,
Todd (Brian Matthews), participated in a prank that left the caretaker, Cropsey
(Lou David), horribly burned and eager for revenge. At the end of the film,
Todd kills Cropsey
with the help of a camper, Alfred (Brian Backer). Koven ob-
serves that “the grown-up Alfred, now telling this tale to campers around a camp-
fire, thereby [returns] the narrative, albeit fictively, back into the oral tradition”
(126 –27).
Another horror movie,
Sleepaway Camp
(1983), has become, like
Friday the
13th
and
Th
e Burning,
a cult classic. The central character, Angela (Felissa Rose),
moves in with her Aunt Martha (Desirée Gould) after losing her family in a boat-
ing accident. With her cousin Ricky ( Jonathan Tiersten), shy,
taciturn Angela
goes to Camp Arawak for the summer. Unwilling to participate in most camp
activities, she becomes the target of “mean girl” taunts from a bully named Judy
(Karen Fields). Boys at the camp enjoy playing pranks; they squirt shaving cream
into a sleeping bunkmate’s hand, pretend that a water snake lurks near a canoe,
and reminisce about hanging girls’ underwear from the flagpole. Shortly after
Angela and Ricky arrive at Camp Arawak, staff members and campers start to die
in a series of horrible accidents. Uncertainty about the murderer’s identity keeps
tension high until the shocking final scene.
Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers
(1988) begins with campers listening to the story of what happened after Angela
and Ricky came to Camp Arawak. In 1988 the movie’s marketers issued a
Sleep-
away Camp Survival Kit
containing the original movie and two of its sequels. The
red ink on the cover of this survival kit feels sticky, like blood; inside the cover are
pictures of band-aids, gauze, and other first aid supplies. This unusual packaging
makes a point that most horror movie fans already understand: slasher classics are
not
just scary, but funny as well. Camp movie classics like the
Sleepaway Camp
series serve as examples of the genre of humor called
camp:
outrageous, tasteless
humor that amuses the viewer because it tests boundaries of acceptability.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
