“CAMP BLOOD” (1999) & “CAMP BLOOD 2” (2000): THE SLASHER CINEMA OF PURE ID

By Lou Toad

Let’s get this out of the way: Camp Blood (1999) and its direct-to-video sequel Camp Blood 2 (2000) are, by any metric resembling “quality,” irredeemably bad movies. The acting is bad in the way that people who have never acted think acting should be. The budget—barely cresting the triple digits—ensures that everything from lighting to sound design resembles the most expensive home video you and your friends never made. The plot is a Mad Libs version of Friday the 13th, which itself was a Mad Libs version of Halloween, and it all plays out with the self-serious commitment of a high school drama club doing a “mature” play about drug addiction.

And yet.

In 1999, I was 13. The same year The Blair Witch Project (another no-budget horror film, albeit one that did things like invent a genre) tricked half of America into thinking it was real, I was in my friend’s backyard with a Hi8 camcorder, two cheap masks from Spencer’s, and a script written on the back of my Algebra homework. We were making a slasher movie, which—if you were 13 and had access to a camera—was one of exactly two movies you were capable of making, the other being an action movie where you karate-kick your younger brother into a bush.

If we had fifty more bucks, an uncle with a decent camcorder, and a single marginal Hollywood connection, we might have made Camp Blood. And that, dear reader, is the point.

Because what Camp Blood lacks in originality, competence, or, frankly, dignity, it makes up for in an earnest commitment to the idea of the slasher film as an undying folk ritual. This was 1999—three years after Scream had turned horror into a postmodern in-joke, its sequels and imitators all armed with self-aware teenagers and ironic detachment. Slashers in this era weren’t scary, they were clever. They were characters who had seen horror movies before and knew the rules. But Camp Blood does not know the rules. Camp Blood does not know anything. And in that, it is free.

The film follows the structure you expect: campers, woods, masked killer, a slow parade of deaths. The clown-masked murderer—a nice aesthetic flourish, if you can call “owning a mask and putting it on an actor” an artistic decision—dispatches victims with a gleeful lack of irony. And while the acting is pure Craigslist, the gore is surprisingly decent, in that delightful mid-tier Halloween store way where fake intestines look like something you’d dare your friend to eat for five bucks.

And then there’s Camp Blood 2. If the first film was a found object of no-budget horror, its sequel is an act of pathological persistence. It exists because why wouldn’t it exist? The world didn’t need one Camp Blood, so it certainly didn’t need two. And yet, like the final girl at the end of a slasher movie, it refuses to die. The sequel is functionally identical to its predecessor, only with even less justification and an even stronger sense that the cast and crew are performing under some form of legally binding obligation.

So what do we do with these films now? In 2025, the “late 90s/early 2000s shot-on-video slasher” has accumulated enough dust to qualify as vintage, maybe even kitsch. You could program them at a midnight screening with a sense of ironic detachment, but that feels disingenuous. Because there is no irony here—only pure, uncut horror movie id.

Maybe that’s why they stick with me. Not because they’re “good.” They are not. But because they represent a moment when horror films could still be made by anyone—before digital slickness, before “elevated horror,” before every movie had to be a commentary on itself. Camp Blood is bad. But it’s bad in the same way your own backyard slasher was bad. And maybe that’s why it’s kind of perfect.