Some Summer Camps Should Stay Closed, and Tubi Has the Evidence
Crystal Lake is reopening its darkest chapter, and seven movies like Friday the 13th on Tubi are ready to make summer camp look like an equally terrible idea.
Summer camp sounds great on paper. Fresh air. Swimming. Campfires. Questionable cafeteria food. Horror had other plans and would like to check in.
Few places have done more damage to summer camp's reputation than Crystal Lake. Friday the 13th turned ordinary cabins, trails, and waterfront views into a destination where hearing “the camp is reopening” feels less like good news and more like the beginning of an incident report. And now, we're going back.
Peacock's Crystal Lake digs into the history surrounding Pamela Voorhees and the tragedy that put her family on a collision course with the camp. Longtime fans get to return to the place that started the franchise before Jason became its resident boogeyman. Newcomers only need to know one thing: Crystal Lake has history, and none of it suggests booking a cabin.
Summer camp practically arrives horror-ready anyway. You're away from home. The woods are dark. Campfire stories give every strange noise a backstory. Once a place earns a reputation, the legend can become just as frightening as whatever happened there in the first place. Crystal Lake practically built a franchise out of it.
That same slasher instinct runs through Tubi's Slashers collection, but we're taking the scenic route through the woods with seven camps that make similarly terrible cases for enrollment. Some bring vengeful killers. Others have local legends, ghosts, or histories somebody really should've investigated before reopening.
Pack bug spray. Maybe leave the sleeping bag at home.
Friday the 13th
Camp Crystal Lake tried reopening once. We all know how well that went.
Years after young Jason Voorhees drowns while attending camp, new owner Steve Christy decides Camp Crystal Lake deserves another summer in Friday the 13th. The locals aren't exactly enthusiastic about the plan. The camp has a reputation. People have died there before. One particularly committed town resident even tries warning the incoming counselors. Naturally, camp preparations continue.
What follows helped establish a template horror would spend decades happily revisiting: attractive young counselors, an isolated location, a killer picking them off, and enough bad history attached to the property that everyone probably should've listened to Crazy Ralph. The survivors who make it through movies like this would eventually become their own horror tradition, one we've explored in our guide to the final girls who refuse to stay down.
But the original movie also hits differently once you remember how much of the franchise's iconography hadn't arrived yet. Jason isn't stalking counselors in his hockey mask. The grief and rage driving the killings belong to his mother, Pamela Voorhees, whose son became inseparable from Crystal Lake long before he became its resident boogeyman. Jason may eventually become the face of the franchise, but its first killing spree belongs to Pamela and the grief she has attached permanently to this place.
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Sleepaway Camp
Camp Arawak would like to offer swimming, sports, friendship, and several formative childhood memories. Some will be significantly more traumatic than others.
Shy teenager Angela arrives at Camp Arawak with her protective cousin Ricky after a boating accident has already left her family carrying serious trauma in Sleepaway Camp. Angela quickly becomes a target for bullying, cruel campers, and adults whose behavior does very little to make Arawak seem like a professionally supervised environment. People who mistreat her also start dying.
The movie arrived only a few years after Friday the 13th, when summer camp slashers were quickly becoming their own horror playground, but Angela gives this one an identity that's difficult to confuse with Crystal Lake. The murders sit beside adolescent cruelty, uncomfortable adults, and a camp social hierarchy where fitting in already feels dangerous before anyone realizes there's a killer nearby. Horror fans know Sleepaway Camp is also famous for an ending that has generated decades of discussion. We're leaving that conversation safely zipped inside the tent for anyone watching for the first time. Camp Arawak has enough problems without spoilers.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
The Burning
Many camp legends begin centuries ago. Cropsy only needed one extremely bad prank.
Camp caretaker Cropsy becomes the target of a cruel prank that leaves him horribly burned when the stunt goes wrong in The Burning. Years later, Cropsy leaves the hospital carrying more than physical scars. Returning to the world of summer camps gives him access to an entirely new group of young people who had nothing to do with the original incident. Nobody said revenge was reasonable.
Released the year after Friday the 13th, The Burning belongs to the early wave of slashers that realized summer camp offered almost everything a killer could want: isolation, woods, teenagers, sharp equipment, and adults located somewhere conveniently unhelpful. Makeup-effects legend Tom Savini helps make Cropsy's revenge particularly difficult to look away from, with practical gore that gives the movie some of its most notorious moments.
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Madman
Every campfire has somebody who tells the scary story a little too convincingly. Maybe don't challenge the subject of the story to show himself.
Counselors gathered around a campfire hear the legend of Madman Marz, a farmer said to have murdered his family before disappearing into the surrounding wilderness in Madman. The story comes with one useful piece of advice: don't say his name above a whisper. You can probably guess what someone does.
Madman takes one of summer camp's most innocent traditions and lets horror logic finish the assignment. Campfire stories are supposed to make the woods feel dangerous for a few minutes before everyone laughs and goes back to the cabin. Here, telling the legend may be exactly what makes the surrounding darkness worth worrying about. Listening remains optional. Survival may not be.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Camp Cold Brook
We know that in horror, some people accidentally stumble into haunted places. These people brought cameras.
Ratings are slipping for the paranormal reality show at the center of Camp Cold Brook, so its crew goes looking for a location capable of making viewers pay attention again. An abandoned summer camp with a horrific past sounds promising. It is. Just not necessarily in the way they wanted.
Decades have passed since a mass tragedy emptied Camp Cold Brook, but investigating what happened there quickly becomes much less theoretical once the crew arrives. Whatever remained after everyone else left doesn't seem particularly interested in staying off-camera. Unlike the counselors preparing for an ordinary summer elsewhere on this list, these characters know they're walking into somewhere with a disturbing history. They go anyway. Horror appreciates initiative.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Sleepaway Slasher
Nothing says “respecting a location's traumatic history” like turning it into entertainment.
Horror filmmakers gather at an isolated campground for a film festival in Sleepaway Slasher, bringing people who make scary movies into the kind of location where they'd usually tell everyone else not to wander off alone. The weekend grows much less recreational once the campground's own violent history starts intruding on the festivities.
The setup gives summer-camp horror a self-aware twist. Everyone is gathering because they already enjoy scary movies, putting horror fans inside a setting that looks suspiciously like the kind of place they've watched people make terrible decisions for decades. Knowing the tropes doesn't necessarily grant immunity.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
What Happens After the Massacre?
Finally, somebody asked the question horror camps have been avoiding for decades. What happens next summer?
The massacre has already happened by the time What Happens After the Massacre? begins. A masked killer terrorized a camp, people survived, and the location earned exactly the kind of reputation that should make “reopening” a difficult pitch. Preparations begin anyway. Because the business model survives everything (did you hear our sarcasm?).
Starting after the bloodshed gives the movie a different problem to play with. The characters aren't wandering into a camp blissfully unaware that something terrible happened there. The massacre is recent enough to shape how people talk about the place, how returning survivors move through it, and what another summer at Camp Phoenix is supposed to look like after the last one ended in murder. And once new violence threatens Camp Phoenix, the question isn't simply whether the killer has returned. It's whether this camp ever really moved past what happened in the first place.
At a certain point, the waiver needs to mention the body count.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.