Dissecting Slashers - The Burning (1981)

Tom Savini returns to camp.

BACKGROUND 

Long before Harvey Weinstein became one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood (and  then went to prison as a convicted sex offender), he was a young man who dreamed of breaking into the movie industry – and he knew just how to do it. He would bring the story of the maniac called Cropsy to the screen. 

The story was told around campfires in New York State. It concerned a deformed man who had suffered a terrible accident and, depending on the version of the story, returned to a summer camp to take revenge on the children who had wronged him. For years, the tale existed as an urban legend shared among campers. Now, it would serve as the basis for a feature film.

Harvey and his brother Bob were working in the music world, promoting rock concerts, and they were looking for an inexpensive way to make the leap into filmmaking. In 1979, Harvey wrote a five-page treatment titled The Cropsy Maniac. The treatment was registered in 1980, approximately a month before the summer camp horror classic Friday the 13th was released. So the project was in development before Friday the 13th became a phenomenon, but the enormous success of Friday the 13th would inevitably influence what it would become.

The Weinsteins teamed with Michael Cohl and Corky Burger to produce their summer camp slasher, and were able to raise a budget somewhere in the range of $500,000 to $1.5 million. Whatever the case, they were newcomers to feature filmmaking and underestimated how much money would be required for the behind-the-scenes aspects of production, so the movie eventually went over budget.

Tony Maylam was a British filmmaker who had established himself through rock music documentaries during the 1970s. He had also directed the Michael York adventure film Riddle of the Sands in 1979. Maylam's background made him a natural fit for the Weinsteins and Burger, who were still involved in the rock promotion business. That connection brought them together.

Maylam later described Harvey and Bob Weinstein as “driven.” They were not approaching the Cropsy story simply as a cherished piece of folklore that deserved a cinematic adaptation. They saw an opportunity in it. The brothers understood that horror was commercially viable, that audiences were responding to increasingly graphic slashers, and that the emerging formula could be exploited. The success of Friday the 13th reinforced that instinct.

Once Maylam came aboard, development moved quickly. The screenplay, written by Bob Weinstein and Peter Lawrence (with Harvey receiving story credit alongside Brad Grey and Maylam) was completed in only six weeks and was deliberately molded to fit the conventions of the emerging slasher genre. Harvey Weinstein insisted that there should be a murder approximately every ten minutes, although it didn’t quite turn out that way. Maylam also contributed one of the film's defining elements: he came up with the idea of giving Cropsy a pair of garden shears as his signature weapon. 

One of the most important pieces of the production fell into place when Maylam and the Weinsteins secured special effects makeup artist Tom Savini. Savini had already established himself as one of the premier practitioners of horror effects, and he had just delivered the gruesome makeup and gore effects for Friday the 13th. The Weinsteins flew to Pittsburgh to meet him. The producers wanted to push the violence in their film as far as possible. The increasingly graphic nature of horror filmmaking had become part of the genre's commercial appeal, and The Cropsy Maniac – or The Burning, as it ended up being called – was intended to compete on that level.

Savini also had his own reasons for being interested. He turned down the opportunity to return for Friday the 13th Part 2 because he had difficulty accepting the idea that the “drowned child” Jason Voorhees would now be a fully grown killer, while also citing “miscommunications” with the film's backers. He also said he preferred the script for The Burning. Whether he really preferred the material or whether the Weinsteins offered a more appealing paycheck isn’t clear. What is clear is that Savini joined the production and once again created an assortment of effects that would become some of the film's most memorable moments.

The start date for filming was set for August 18, 1980, although some shooting may have taken place before that date. The timetable was extremely tight. Much of the movie takes place outdoors at a summer camp, meaning the filmmakers had a limited opportunity to capture the appropriate season. The decision to move quickly made commercial sense as well. The Weinsteins were entering a booming but unpredictable marketplace. Halloween had established the modern slasher formula. Friday the 13th had demonstrated just how profitable a cheaply made horror movie could be. The opportunity was there, but it would not remain there forever.

SETTING

The Burning was shot around Buffalo and North Tonawanda, New York – and even though filming was taking place in the last weeks of the summer season, they were able to fully capture that summer vibe. I’m not an outdoorsy person, and this movie is a shining example of how uncomfortable it is to be out in the elements during the dog days of summer. It looks sweaty and miserable, with bugs flying and crawling everywhere.

The filming took place in and around existing summer camps, adding to that authentic feel. The story begins at a place called Camp Blackfoot, but we’re only there long enough to set up the tragic circumstances that lead to the killings. The majority of the killings occur five years later, in and around a place called Camp Stonewater, which sits on the edge of Devil’s Creek. Presumably the same body of water that Blackfoot sat beside.

I have never stayed at a summer camp (and I purposely skipped the experience when my grade school class spent the week at a camp), but I love watching summer camp slashers, and The Burning has a great camp setting.

KILLER

The killer is the legendary Cropsy Maniac, although the writers reworked the legend for the film. Rather than just being a campfire ghost story, Cropsy became a conventional slasher villain with a tragic backstory, a motive for revenge, and an elaborate series of murders.

The key incident is the fire that disfigured him. At Camp Blackfoot, Cropsy (played by Lou David) was the camp caretaker, and he was extremely unpopular with the campers. He was an alcoholic and a sadist, described as “a really evil bastard.” Sometimes he would get physically violent with the campers. Sometimes he would focus on a particular camper and follow them around night and day, making their life a living hell. He got pleasure out of hurting and scaring people – and everywhere he went, he carried his garden shears.

Five years ago, a group of campers got sick of Cropsy’s antics and decided to get revenge by scaring the hell out of him in return. They set up a very realistic-looking skull in his room while he slept, with worms crawling on it and candles burning in the eye sockets. Cropsy was only supposed to wake up and be scared by the skull. Instead, the drunk man freaked out so badly that he managed to knock the skull onto his bed sheets, which the candles instantly ignited. Cropsy himself burst into flames.

Most slasher movies would have their time jump as soon as the burning Cropsy has jumped into the closest body of water. Instead, The Burning spends some time showing us that Cropsy was taken to St. Catherine’s Hospital in New York City. The doctors do everything they can for him, but the skin grafts don’t take and Cropsy is left horribly disfigured. 

When he’s released from the hospital, he tries to have “a date” with a hooker – but even though he picks what must have been the least appealing hooker on the block, she still has an over-the-top reaction to his appearance. He kills her. His first victim (as far as we know).

Now the film jumps ahead five years. Camp Blackfoot is long gone, so Cropsy is lurking in the woods around Camp Stonewater, having set up a lair in a nearby abandoned copper mine. Garden shears in hand, he starts picking off the campers, leading him on the path to a reunion with one of the campers responsible for his burns.

Tom Savini has said that he didn’t have much time to put together the special effects for this movie and only had three or four days to make the Cropsy make-up. The mask was created in his dressing room when he was in between working on the other special effects needed for the death scenes. In his book Grande Illusions, he reveals that he based the look of Cropsy on a burnt beggar he had seen as a kid in Pittsburgh, as well as textbooks on burn victims. Due to the time constraints, the mask he made looks more like the skin is melting rather than being burned, but it still works perfectly for the character.

Although Lou David is created as Cropsy and plays the character when he’s fully on screen, Maylam has said that he played Cropsy for about 90% of the movie. We usually only see Cropsy’s hands holding his garden shares, and those hands primarily belonged to the director, as he couldn’t get anyone else to hold the shears the way he wanted.

FINAL GIRL

Well, the “final girl” in this movie would be Leah Ayres as Michelle, the camp counselor who leads a group of campers back from a disastrous overnight canoe trip and alerts the authorities that someone is killing the kids of Camp Stonewater... But this isn’t a final girl sort of slasher movie.

Instead, we get a pair of “final boys.” There’s the awkward, creepy, voyeuristic camper Alfred (Brian Backer), who ends up getting chased into Cropsy’s mine shaft lair, and there’s counselor Todd (Brian Matthews), who goes to the mine to save Alfred and face off with Cropsy in the climactic sequence.

Todd is an authoritative counselor who is shown doing his best to keep these unruly campers under control, but there are some odd elements to this character as well. Take into account the fact that he tells the Cropsy legend to his campers as a creepy campfire story – but is then revealed to be one of the kids responsible for Cropsy’s burning five years earlier. Even if he thought Cropsy was a douche, you’d think he’d have enough remorse over nearly burning a man to death that he wouldn’t turn the story into a campfire goof.

The Todd character was meant to be 19 in the movie, but Matthews himself was closing in on 30 and definitely comes off that way. Todd grew up a lot in those five years.

VICTIMS

We are introduced to a lot of Camp Stonewater campers, so there’s a long list of potential victims, including characters played by the likes of Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, Shelley Bruce, Ame Segull (daughter of casting director Joy Todd), and more. A surprising amount of campers make it through the movie unscathed.

Still, Cropsy does manage to take out eight of them, plus the prostitute (K.C. Townsend).

It is nearly impossible to keep Harvey Weinstein’s crimes out of your mind when watching this movie, because there is a definitely creep vibe to it and its characters. Not only do you have Alfred spying on people while they’re being intimate or taking a shower (in outdoor shower booths that don’t have ceilings), but you also have two couples where the males are desperately trying to get the females to have sex with them.

There’s the couple of Eddy (Ned Eisenberg) and Karen (Carolyn Houlihan), where Eddy turns into an angry bastard when Karen won’t have sex with him after agreeing to go skinny-dipping with him. And there’s Glazer (Larry Joshua), who eventually does get his girlfriend Sally (Carrick Glenn) to have sex with him, but doesn’t perform to her satisfaction.

Eddy, Karen, Glazer, and Sally all end up dead. Karen and Glazer get individual death scenes, Sally is killed off-screen, and Eddy dies in the film’s most famous sequence: the raft massacre.

Eddy is on a raft with campers Fish (J.R. McKechnie), Barbara (Sarah Chodoff), Diane (Kevi Kendall), and Woodstock (Fisher Stevens) when they come upon a seemingly empty canoe, floating in the creek. When they reach the canoe, Cropsy is revealed to be inside, and he makes quick work of them with his garden shears.

Some of the victims don’t make much of an impression, but Woodstock is a major presence in the film and is part of a comic relief team with Fish and Alexander’s character Dave. Co-star Bonnie Deroski, who played a camper named Marnie, said Alexander and Stevens as particularly important to the movie's comedy because the comedic material in the script wasn’t especially funny. Alexander and Stevens rewrote their characters’ material to make it more amusing.

DEATHS

The Burning is best known for its death scenes, because Tom Savini once again delivered the goods. Most of the kills are committed with garden shears, but the lack of variety doesn’t keep them from being bloody delights.

We get some throat slashing, a couple throat stabbings, a head slice, severed fingers, and damage to stomachs and chests. It’s all topped off with an axe to the face. 

Some of the kills may look familiar to slasher fans, because Savini recycled a couple of his effects tricks from Friday the 13th.

CLICHÉS

A good number of the classic slasher movie clichés are present in this one. There are horny campers who have one primary goal that has nothing to do with swimming, canoeing, or learning wilderness survival. Unfortunately for them, the “sex equals death” cliché is also present. (But the rule is not unbreakable.)

You have Alfred as the creepy voyeur, who somehow turns out to be one of the people we're supposed to root for. There are the asshole characters, killer P.O.V. shots, and the isolated location where it seems like no help will be coming – or if it does come, it’s going to show up too late.

Cropsy, like most slashers, has his signature weapon.

And, best of all, we have the “campfire story comes true” cliché.

POSTMORTEM 

The raft massacre is the sequence that has kept The Burning alive in the horror conversation. It’s the best scene in the movie, the biggest showcase of bloodshed – even though audiences didn't get to see all of what Savini had created, since The Burning was heavily cut in the United States before receiving its R rating. The MPAA ratings board were starting to come down hard on gory slasher movies at that time.

The British release had an even rougher time with the censors. The BBFC demanded cuts to the murder of the prostitute and portions of the raft massacre before giving the film an X certificate. Then, thanks to an unfortunate home video mistake, Thorn EMI accidentally released an uncut version of The Burning in the United Kingdom. That meant the movie found itself caught up in Britain's infamous "video nasty" panic. The uncut tape became liable for seizure and prosecution under the Obscene Publications Acts, and Thorn EMI had to issue a censored replacement. Additional cuts were made to later releases before the film finally became available completely uncut in Britain in 2002.

Filmways Pictures picked up the American distribution rights in February of 1981 after seeing the movie in Los Angeles. The company was in financial trouble at the time and was hoping to make some quick money from the slasher boom. The Burning opened in Florida on May 8, 1981, on 110 screens, with a wider regional rollout following later that month. It had one encouraging early showing in Buffalo, near where much of the movie had been filmed, where it played three theatres and two drive-ins and brought in $33,000. But that success didn't last. The movie's box-office take dropped by more than 50 percent the following week.

And The Burning had a brutal amount of competition. It was going up against Happy Birthday to Me, Friday the 13th Part 2, Final Exam, The Fan, Graduation Day, Eyes of a Stranger, and a successful re-release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Most damaging of all was Friday the 13th Part 2, which had the advantage of being part of an established franchise and had a premise that was extremely similar to The Burning. Audiences didn't necessarily need to take a chance on a new camp slasher when they could just go see what Jason Voorhees was up to.

The Burning lasted in Variety's top 50 for only four weeks and initially brought in just $270,508. It reportedly received a "chilly reception" in San Francisco and Chicago, and when it opened elsewhere it debuted at number 23 behind Happy Birthday to Me at number one and Friday the 13th Part 2 at number two. It was also playing on much fewer screens than those movies.

That might have been the end of the story, but The Burning got another theatrical life. Orion Pictures, which had recently merged with Filmways, released the movie in New York in November of 1982 with a new poster showing Cropsy's face reflected in a burning eye. The new release performed better in its first week, taking in $401,258 in just seven days. But it couldn't sustain that momentum either, and by December it had fallen from 78 screens to just eight. Its reported American theatrical gross eventually reached $707,770, although the film's multiple releases and alternate titles make it difficult to establish one definitive box-office total.

There were apparently promotional materials using the title Cropsy, and the film may also have played under the title Campfire Tales. Changing titles wasn't unusual for exploitation movies, sometimes as a way of making an old movie look like something new, so The Burning's theatrical history is somewhat murky.

Maylam has said that the movie actually sold well internationally and did make back its budget. Japan was particularly receptive to it. When The Burning opened there in September of 1981, it made $283,477 in a single week from just four Tokyo cinemas and had grossed $1.2 million from eleven Japanese theaters in its first sixteen days. The British release, on the other hand, had only modest success and quickly "hit the skids," according to Variety. So the movie wasn't the complete financial disaster its American theatrical numbers might suggest. But it certainly wasn't the next Friday the 13th.

That wasn't the only disappointment surrounding The Burning. Maylam has said there was talk of making a sequel while the first film was wrapping, but he was wary of becoming known exclusively as a horror director. The original movie's disappointing box office didn't exactly strengthen the case for a sequel, either, and the idea went nowhere.

Critical reaction was rough, as to be expected.

The Burning has always been more interesting to me as a piece of horror history than as an actual movie. I love slasher movies. I'm exactly the sort of person who was always going to seek The Burning out because I'd heard about the raft massacre, because Tom Savini did the effects, because the movie has become one of those titles that serious slasher fans are expected to have seen. But during my first several viewings of it, I found it strangely empty. The first half in particular spends a lot of time simply hanging around Camp Stonewater, observing the campers and counselors and their relationships. That's not necessarily a bad approach (in theory, spending time with the characters should make us care about what happens to them) but I never become particularly invested in these people.

The movie has plenty of atmosphere. Maylam peppers those quieter scenes with POV shots, glimpses of Cropsy, strange movements around the camp, and other indications that something is lurking nearby. But for me, the suspense doesn't build into much. The movie can be kind of dull. And then Cropsy shows up with those garden shears and Savini's effects take over, and suddenly you're watching the movie you hoped for.

The fact that The Burning remains so well remembered despite those shortcomings is largely because of what surrounds it. This was the movie that brought the Weinstein brothers into the industry, and a lot of talent was involved with the project. Jack Sholder edited The Burning before going on to direct Alone in the Dark, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, and The Hidden. The cast includes Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, Holly Hunter, and Brian Backer. Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist best known for his work with Yes, provided the score. And, of course, Tom Savini supplied the gore.

The movie also has an unusual place in Savini's career. He had already become a legend through his work on Dawn of the Dead and Friday the 13th, and The Burning gave him another opportunity to create spectacular kills. The raft massacre is the obvious centerpiece, but the entire production demonstrates what made his work so popular during this period.

The raft sequence takes up less than forty seconds of screen time, but those forty seconds are the reason people still talk about The Burning.

Today, The Burning is generally regarded much more fondly than it was in 1981. Its reputation was helped enormously by the restoration of Savini's gore, the rise of home video horror culture, and generations of slasher fans discovering it after the theatrical competition that doomed it had moved on.

The Burning is a fascinating snapshot of a very specific moment in horror history: an authentic regional campfire legend turned into a movie by two future industry giants, produced in the immediate aftermath of Friday the 13th, loaded with future stars and genre talent, savaged by the censors, overwhelmed by competition, and eventually rescued by the horror fans who understood exactly why that forty-second raft massacre mattered.

The movie has really grown on me over the years. I don’t find it to be as dull as I used to. (And I have to mention that my first impressions were affected by the fact that the only VHS copy of The Burning that was available to rent in my hometown was pretty bad quality.) In recent years, I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of watching The Burning than I ever did before. And while I may not care about the characters very much, some of them do have their moments. It's not my favorite slasher movie, but if you're a serious slasher fan, you have to see it. After all, Cropsy has been waiting in the woods for generations. You might as well find out what all the screaming is about.