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A group of summer campers sit around a fire telling scary stories, each trying to be more sensationalistic than the last. One girl insists her story is true and happened at a camp only 60 miles from theirs. At that ill-fated camp, a 14-year-old girl snapped and started murdering campers and the camp employees. But the “wildest part” was the reveal that the murderous teenage girl was born a boy and had been forced to present as a girl by her deranged aunt. When someone asks whatever became of the killer, one of the campers chimes in with the final stinger to the story that not only is she still alive, but that “the doctors gave him a sex change, and our parents’ tax paid for it!”

Although you could easily mistake this transphobic campfire sequence for something you would hear around a campfire in 2023, it is from the 1988 film Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers. It’s a sad testament to American society that the dialogue in an 80s slasher seems even more plausible today than it did when the movie was released, right down to the implied chagrin that someone’s tax dollars would go to improving the conditions of someone else’s life.

Yet this opening is misleading. Because although the movie starts like any other summer camp slasher, it quickly reveals its delightfully dark and campy approach to horror. Sleepaway Camp II is a fascinating, funny, and cathartic experience thanks in no small part to our killer and de facto protagonist Angela — an overtly enthusiastic trans camp counselor who throws out one-liners while she dispatches ill-behaved campers.

While the first Sleepaway Camp has Angela killing predators and bullies that target her, Sleepaway Camp II has her “sending home” any campers who don't live up to her high expectations of the wholesome experience summer camp should be. As viewers, we aren’t being asked to condone Angela’s actions. It is more that we can delight in being ahead of the curve. Two twins who focus more on smoking pot and sleeping with the boys? You already know they are goners. The ones who plan to scare Angela by dressing like Freddy and Jason? Goners. This movie even features a wildly fun parody of its slasher peers, with Angela dressing like Leatherface and using a chainsaw to dispatch her would-be prankers.

But my favorite scene, not to mention one of the funniest I have ever seen in any slasher movie, is towards the end. Upon realizing one of the campers is VERY slowly starting to piece together that the people Angela “sent home” aren’t actually at home, Angela calmly and deliberately starts to walk around the cabin and look for objects she can murder the girl with. Meanwhile, the camper remains utterly oblivious while talking incessantly in an adjoining room till Angela finally kills her with a guitar string.

Watching such a high-strung villain like Angela calmly walk around and tap sharpened pencils and coat hangers against her skin to analyze the damage the objects could do to someone just sends me. The comedy hits another peak when another girl comes in, sees the body, and says straight to the camera in a first-person POV shot, “but I didn’t do anything!?” — a small meta moment implying she somehow knows “the rules” of the movie she is in. Angela calmly responds “you are going to tell” and stabs her to death to avoid getting caught.

By the end of the film, Angela’s spree is so utterly ridiculous and our supposed final girl Molly is so bland, you are left rooting for Angela as the more dynamic character. She’s evil, but she ultimately has a twisted moral compass guiding her murders. Angela wants the innocent sleepaway camp experience she was deprived of all those years ago, and her persistence is bizarrely endearing. She feels like a younger Mrs. Voorhees combined with the one-liners of various Ghostfaces, and actress Pamela Springsteen leans into the comedy every chance she gets.

I also find it fascinating that an intentionally cheesy slasher sequel decided to just embrace Angela as a woman. Yes, it glosses over the wrong gender being foisted upon Angela by her legal guardian in the first movie and jumps to her getting gender-affirming surgery in the sequel. But there is probably an alternative reality in the multiverse featuring a cheaper story where Angela is played by a cisgender man posing as a woman to reinforce the same tired, toxic narrative we’ve seen time and time again in the media.

Instead, she is played by an attractive albeit cisgender actress who somehow manages to make us laugh even as Angela foists her nearly puritanical values on her teen campers under punishment of death. Angela is even given a surprising bit of depth in a late scene showing her struggling with nightmares of what she has done and the way things have gone so wrong. Other than the intro and Angela’s monologue at the end, Angela’s gender is really not that important to the film other than giving us a rare female slasher villain. Moreover, the film gives us a queer villain whose motivations do not lie in some implied psychosis regarding their LGBTQ+ identity, but instead in their Type-A insistence that things should be done a certain, proper way.

It feels like we need this movie more than ever in the current anti-trans moral panic infecting modern society. It’s wild to see the way the film encourages us to delight in Angela’s murder spree. It revels in not taking itself too seriously even as Angela continuously takes everything too seriously. The film ultimately ends in Angela’s favor, with her leaving Camp Rolling Hills with seemingly no witnesses left intact. Our chipper queer killer has lived to see another day, and may goodness help anyone who stands in her way.