The Burning
Summer camp and slasher movies, two peculiarly specific American trends which seem to have tangled irrevocably together, largely thanks to Jason Voorhees who seems to extend his shelf life every time he curtails that of one of the endless supply of visitors to Camp Crystal Lake and the surrounding area while also inspiring what might be kindly termed “homages” though could more accurately be described as rip-offs.
Among these was The Burning of 1981, conceived before the release of Friday the 13th but undoubtedly influenced by its success the previous summer, opening with a flashback to a tragic incident some years before at Camp Blackfoot where a group of resentful teenage boys play an ill-advised prank on caretaker Cropsy which gets tragically out of hand.
It’s all fun and games until someone ends up in the hospital burn unit where the staff refer to you as “an overdone Big Mac,” and with skin grafts failing and little attempt at rehabilitation to overcome the trauma over the five years he is a patient as soon as he is released Cropsy is murdering prostitutes and returning to the forests and rivers where the teenagers still gather every summer for the trip up Devil’s Creek…
Directed by Tony Maylam, the screenplay for The Burning is credited to Bob Weinstein and Peter Lawrence from a story by Brad Grey, Tony Maylam and the now notorious Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, the latter of whom also served as producer, and with hindsight there is much which seems less to speak of the narrative and the conventions of the horror genre and more of the filmmakers.
Serial killer Cropsy aside, the men are predatory and disregard any boundaries the women try to impose on them, The Burning not so much a film of the male gaze than outright leering, a specific example being the scene when Karen and Eddy (Carolyn Houlihan and Ned Eisenberg) go skinny-dipping, he shot from the neck up and she presented in a full frontal, she killed immediately after while he survives, for the time being at least.
With a conventional and uninspiring narrative as thin as the paper the script was printed on, where The Burning does succeed is in the cinematography of Harvey Harrison, no easy feat on a low-budget production in the unforgiving location of Tonawanda Creek in rural western New York, the makeup supervised by Tom Savini and the atypical soundtrack, surprisingly provided by prog rock keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman with whom Maylam had previously collaborated on the Winter Olympics documentary White Rock.
The Burning is streaming on Arrow now
