Essentially a cheap rural rip-off of John Carpenter's hugely influential Halloween, this trail-blazing mix of bloody horror and teenage terror from low-budget sleaze merchant Sean S Cunningham kick-started the splatter stalk-and-slash vogue of the 1980s. The catalogue of gruesome slaughter occurs when Camp Crystal Lake re-opens for summer business after a brutal unsolved murder has kept it closed for years. Cunningham skilfully works up plenty of gory scares, while also allowing the audience to sympathise with the counsellors (including a pre-stardom Kevin Bacon) under repeated attack from a mystery assailant. The climactic finale is strong stuff and leads to a Carrie-inspired jolt ending, which left the door open for numerous sequels of varying quality.

Camp counselors are stalked and murdered by an unknown assailant while trying to reopen a summer camp that was the site of a child's drowning.