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THE BURNING (1981) & One of the Greatest Kills of All Time 

By. Bee Delores

Tony Maylam’s THE BURNING arrived during the 1981-82 slasher peak. It cashed in on Friday the 13th buzz for an equally sleazy slasher, also homaging A Bay of Blood (1971), and helped solidify the camp-side splatter flick. As a spiritual companion to Just Before Dawn (1981), the film introduced the world to Jason Alexander (Seinfeld) in his feature film debut, impressively demonstrating his knack for comedy and one-liners. When online discussions turn to classic 1980s slashers, THE BURNING has slowly gained more recognition in the past several years, joining the ranks of Slaughter High, Sleepaway Camp, The Funhouse, The House on Sorority Row, and The Slumber Party Massacre.

The film opens on a group of teens discussing their plans to pull a prank on Cropsy, the Blackfoot Camp caretaker. Their plot involves putting a wormy skull with candles in the eye sockets next to his bed while he’s fast asleep. When the culprits bang on the windows of his cabin, Cropsy jolts awake and knocks the skull onto his bed, which instantly explodes into roaring flames. He experiences third-degree burns all over his body and recovers in a nearby hospital. Five years later, Cropsy is released from the clinic and encounters a sex worker late one evening. He follows her up to her apartment, where he reveals his deeply scarred face and carves up her stomach like a Thanksgiving turkey with a razor-sharp hunting knife. That opening kill sets the tone for what’s to come, a delightfully campy slasher that knows exactly what it is.

Cropsy works out his rage by hiking to another summer camp, Camp Stonewater. Counselors and campers gleefully bask in the summer sun before heading into the mess hall for supper. Unlike most Friday the 13th films, the inclusion of actual kids is a welcome surprise. Screenwriters Bob Weinstein and Peter Lawrence raise the stakes and give Cropsy a buffet of potential victims. Director Tony Maylam then takes the material and builds tension with various bloody setpieces and disturbing first-person POV shots (think: 1974’s Black Christmas). With a cast of silly characters, including Alexander’s Dave, a flirtatious counselor with a sly wit about him, Maylam adeptly crafts one of the most underrated ensembles in slasher history.

The greatest moment that defines THE BURNING’s placement in horror comes when a group of counselors becomes stranded downstream. Their canoes have gone missing, so they craft a makeshift raft and paddle toward camp. When they spot one of their canoes floating near the shoreline, they cautiously approach, but Cropsy ambushes them and slaughters them in the most gruesome ways. He stabs; he slashes; and he severs a counselor’s fingers in a single sip. You also get the iconic shot of Cropsy lifting his gardening shears over his head, backlit by the scorching sun, before he digs the edges into someone’s body. It’s an absolute bloodbath and a scene that you will never forget. Counselor Michelle (Leah Ayres) discovers their lifeless bodies when the raft eventually arrives at camp. The grisly reveal is chilling but so delicious for slasher fiends. It hits the sweet spot.

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Maylam and his creative team also delight viewers with your classic summer camp treats: ghost stories around a crackling campfire, the gentle hum of crickets and cicadas, refreshing dips in the river, and late-night slumbers in sleeping bags. If you’ve ever experienced summer camp as a kid, you’ll know that overwhelming feeling of freedom without responsibilities all too well. Whether it’s a week-long camp or for the entire summer, the experience seemed to go on forever. Time meant nothing, and it became about all the friendships you made along the way.

THE BURNING remains a relic of a simpler time. There were no rules for horror movies in those days. Slashers could be anything. They could be as bloody, messy, and downright nonsensical as you wanted. Thanks to artists such as Tom Savini, practical effects became all the rage and cemented the horror genre as an artistic model of pure, macabre expressionism. Few slashers ever live up to the 1981 cult classic, and that’s quite alright. We’ll always have Tony Maylam’s film to transport us back to a childhood when our parents forbade us from watching such graphic films, but we always found a way. That’s cinema.

THE BURNING wouldn't exist without the slasher gold rush Friday the 13th kicked off, and that gold rush traces back even further than 1980. Revisit Pleatherface's essay on JAWS and the birth of the summer blockbuster to see where Hollywood's appetite for a hit first took shape.