I never actually went to a summer camp when growing up, but I do know that telling spooky stories around a campfire (preferably while roasting marshmallows to make s’mores) is an integral part of the experience—at least, that’s what every camp-set film ever has led me to believe. While any old urban legend will do when it comes to freaking out fellow campers, telling a scary story set at a camp itself just seems so frightfully fitting…
There are, of course, plenty of horror films that lean into this trope—the Friday the 13th franchise, Sleepaway Camp (1983), and Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021) are a few of the biggest examples—but this list is for fiction lovers! Here are five scary stories that make chilling use of the camp setting.
The Boy in the Woods (2020) by Scott Thomas
It’s the last day of summer camp at Camp Cottonwood, but ten-year-old Eddie Reicher’s parents haven’t shown up to take him home. He has to spend one more night at the near-deserted camp under the watch of the teenage counselors, but at least all of the cruel campers who’ve spent the summer bullying him for his facial scarring—the result of a dog attack years earlier—have gone home. Better yet, Eddie’s crush, June, also has to stay an extra night.
What could have been an evening of dreamily connecting with June soon turns into a nightmare when the counselors start exhibiting weird and dangerous behavior. Expect Friday the 13th vibes, but with a twist to the story.
The Boy in the Woods may be novella-length, but it manages to squeeze a lot of compelling storytelling into its pages. The characters are vividly sketched and the plot is compulsively fast-paced. To top it all off, the ending is an absolute punch in the gut.
Heads Will Roll (2024) by Josh Winning
Josh Winning’s Heads Will Roll feels like a classic camp-set slasher film translated directly into book form. Although most camps cater to kids, the novel’s Camp Castaway serves an adult clientele. Located deep in the woods, the purpose of this camp is to entirely discontent from the world—meaning no phones and no internet—which sounds like the perfect escape for Willow, an actress who has recently been canceled. All of the campers are running away from something, but instead of experiencing a refreshing pause at Camp Castaway, they find themselves literally running for their lives when a killer shows up.
I read Heads Will Roll incredibly quickly, driven by my desire to figure out the identity of the killer, as well as the mystery of the campers’ backstories, I found myself flipping the pages at record speed. Plus, the final act is pure blood-soaked carnage…I couldn’t tear my eyes away. But although blood is certainly spilled, the descriptions of the gore are never that extreme, so the overall tone of the book is less hair-raisingly frightening and more thrillingly fun.
“How to Get Back to the Forest” (2014) by Sofia Samatar
If you’re in the mood for a camp story that doesn’t follow the classic path through the woods or even really play with the typical genre conventions, check out Sofia Samatar’s short story “How to Get Back to the Forest.” The story starts with a girl called Cee telling her friends at camp that they need to make themselves throw up because she’s convinced a metal bug has been implanted in their chests and that puking is the only way to get it out (other than surgery).
From there, the story gets progressively weirder (and a bit less vomit-based!), but as it’s so short I won’t say anything more about the plot. I will say that you’re likely to be left buzzing with questions and puzzling over the intriguing little nuggets of information about this strange and scary world that Samatar drops along the way… (Originally published in Lightspeed, and collected in Tender)
Camp Damascus (2023) by Chuck Tingle
Rather than being set entirely at a camp, the story of Camp Damascus unfolds in the looming shadow cast by a gay conversion camp. The main character is twenty-year-old Rose, a devout Christian whose church essentially rules her hometown of Neverton, Montana. The church is also known for running the titular gay conversion camp which proudly boasts a 100% success rate.
Rose is at a lake with her friends when she sees a ghost-like woman staring at her, and later that evening she starts coughing up flies…like, a lot of flies. Her parents brush it off, but Rose obviously wants to figure out why a swarm of insects erupted from her and why a creepy woman who no one else can see is following her around. This sets her on a path that eventually leads to cracks forming in her faith. Rose reads younger than her twenty years, but there’s a good reason for that which is revealed later in the story, and her character arc is incredibly satisfying to witness.
Camp Damascus goes hard when it comes to depicting the real-life horrors of conversion therapy while also offering up some inventively demonic supernatural scares.
The Troop (2014) by Nick Cutter
Told in the quasi-epistolary style of Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), Nick Cutter’s The Troop documents the horrifying events that occur when a Boy Scout troop takes a trip to a small Canadian island to gain some wilderness experience. Things go off the rails when a voraciously hungry man unexpectedly sails to the island and stumbles his way up to their cabin begging for food. But the man isn’t merely suffering from regular hunger pangs—there’s something far more sinister (and squirmy!) quite literally lurking beneath the surface.
Cutter has a knack for writing gross scenes that are so graphically described that they leave me physically recoiling. There are even some scenes involving animals that are so brutal I had to skim a bit, but it was worth getting though those sections for the elements I loved—primarily the isolated camp setting, the parasite-based body horror, and the fracturing group dynamics in a high-pressure survival situation.
There are plenty of other books and stories that would be right at home on this list, so let me know your favorites below, be they lightly spooky YA thrillers or nightmare-inducing adult novels!
