Vamps, Tramps, and Camps Trivia Quiz

Answer: "A bunch of old men get around me, and start biting and eating me alive."

"Return of the Living Dead" has, over time, become somewhat of a camp zombie classic because of its unabashed '80s aesthetic and its comedic turns. While the night staff of a medical supply facility haphazardly unleash trioxin gas and start a zombie outbreak, a group of teens head next door to the gated cemetery to wait for one of their friends, taking the opportunity to imbibe in drugs and alcohol in their boredom.

Trash, played by Linnea Quigley, appears to be the most promiscuous of the group. She ends up taking off her shirt and dancing on one of the graves shortly before the trioxin (acid) rainstorm hits and, ironically, she gets eaten alive by a bunch of zombies, risen from their graves. Undeniably, Quigley was a horror icon for the decade, appearing in countless straight-to-video genre offerings.

"The Return of the Living Dead" would deviate almost completely from Romero's original "Night of the Living Dead" series, notably introducing zombies that could speak. In a classic moment from this movie, a zombie gets on the walkie-talkie in an ambushed ambulance and calls emergency services to send more paramedics. They do, and it ends the way you think it would.

Answer: Angela

Filing this one under 'movies that couldn't get made today', "Sleepaway Camp" was problematic even in 1983. Coming hot off the heels of the success of "Friday the 13th" (which was already blowing up into a franchise), "Sleepaway Camp" placed a group of teens into the crosshairs of a different type of killer who-- yeah, SPOILERS-- was amongst them the whole time. In the closing scenes, the killer is revealed to be Angela, who's actually Peter, her brother, who grew up mimicking his dead sister; they're seen, naked and brandishing a weapon, in what's considered by many to be one of the most shocking closing scenes in 1980s horror cinema.

It goes without saying that the film has since been the subject of great critical scrutiny for its approach to gender and psychology. While much of the rest of "Sleepaway Camp" is packed with campy (haha) lines and situations, it is quite the exploitative film that's only complicated by the transgressive content. It has since had a heelturn in terms of critical reevaluation, emerging as a midnight movie classic.

It was also followed by a number of not-too-good sequels, but I mean, what wasn't in that era?

Answer: In an RV

Vamps in a camper? Kind of! In "Near Dark", an Oklahoma man, Caleb, finds his life irrevocably changed when he spends the night with a young woman who turns out to be a vampire. He ends up getting taken in by her pseudo-family the next day once the real ramifications of his night settle in, but things go from bad to worse when he has a hard time coping with his newfound inhuman tendencies.

And so the story goes-- the vampires, travelling by RV, travel around the midwest getting into trouble while Caleb's family follows and attempts to save him. And they do (and more!) with blood transfusions, which is a particularly interesting and modern solution that really isn't encountered in vampire cinema. Who knew it'd be so easy?

"Near Dark" was an early movie for inevitable Best Picture winner Kathryn Bigelow. Releasing in 1987, it unfortunately flopped at the box office but has since been regarded as one of the stand-out vampire films of the twentieth century.

Answer: Underground

If you're looking for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, then you'd have to look in the sewers-- "C.H.U.D." takes place in New York City. In this B-movie outing, it appears that the creatures living in the New York City tunnels are hungry, and in what may be the scummiest era for the metropolitan locale (think ooze and flaming oil barrels), they're non-discriminatory with regards to their meals.

In the midst of a homeless disappearance epidemic (as they're getting eaten by C.H.U.D.s), it turns out that no one is safe-- even rich and working-class people are starting to fall victim to the creatures. That's when the NYPD start to get involved, and it opens the door to a much bigger issue with the other types of C.H.U.D.s. You know-- Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal. It's revealed that toxic waste was the problem all along.

Thought "C.H.U.D." wasn't all too highly-regarded in its day, it still ended up receiving a sequel in the form of "C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D." (1989).

Answer: Camp Crystal Lake

A classic (and a humble one by modern standards), "Friday the 13th" kicked off one of horror's most enduring franchises in 1980, and at the time it appeared that no one knew what it had the ability to become. Fresh off the slasher success pushed by John Carpenter (with "Halloween", a couple years earlier), "Friday the 13th" would set the terror in the remote and far-from-innocent summer camp locale and put a group of teenagers into the sightline of a serial killer.

The original "Friday the 13th" ended with the unexpected twist that the killer was actually Jason Voorhees' mother, Pamela, who sought revenge for the death of her son. Jason turns out never to have died at all. It's amazing the grief that could have been saved with the barest minimum of communication, but here we are.

Camp Crystal Lake returned as an iconic horror location across the franchise and launched tropes that would persist in American horror cinema for generations.

Answer: Max

It seems that the Emersons are the only ones around who don't know that Santa Clara, California is teeming with vampires, and when Michael and Sam come across some teenage badboys and Michael ends up falling in with their bad ways, they're caught offguard by what becomes a fight for their lives against a malevolent threat.

In due time, Michael needs to undo his own vampirism, and the only way to do that (with the help of the Frog Brothers) is by killing the head vampire, who it turns out is dating his mother and owns the video store where she works.

"The Lost Boys" was well-received then, and maintained cult status well into the future, being a classic teen vampire movie with a ton of eighties flair and an all-star cast including Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Dianne Wiest, Corey Haim, and Corey Feldman. Feldman would reprise his role in two straight-to-DVD sequels, both of which resulted in 0% scores on Rotten Tomatoes.

Answer: Booze

The sole directed film by J. Michael Muro, who would go on to be a significant force in cinematography and in TV directing, "Street Trash" turned out to be a bit of a labour of love, being filmed on industrial property owned by his family in the mid-1980s. The result was an extremely graphic final product, a result of an aim to be intentionally offensive to all the senses. And it may be gross, but it's modestly well-regarded.

Set in Brooklyn, the film shows the results of some bad beer (Tenafly Viper). After it's sold to some homeless vagrants in New York, those homeless people start melting, and the graphic remains lead the cops to investigate.

It's by no means a film that's everyone's cup of tea, but it is representative of a certain type of gross-out horror subgenre that still had eyes on it, representative of a shift towards more evocative American horror, especially later in the decade, that pushed into the grotesque for exaggerated effect. In the same year, up-and-coming New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson would release "Bad Taste", Robert Scott would showcase "The Video Dead", and we would be (barely) in the wake of Troma's "Class of Nuke 'Em High".

Answer: Night of the Demons

You know how it is. It's Halloween night and you **HAVE TO** party, so you think 'hey, maybe the mortuary is the place to do that.' Before you know it, your friends are getting possessed... or killed and possessed... and the place has no exits, and the only way to survive is to make it to sunlight and kill the demons with said sunlight.

Well, that's what happens in "Night of the Demons", a movie in which a group of teens get themselves into hot water when Suzanne unwittingly gets possessed by a demon and then uses her sexual wiles to spread that possession onward or, in some cases, just kill people. Oh yeah, and Suzanne is played by the ever-present Linnea Quigley.

Is it great? Nah, but it is indicative of the era. It's a by-the-numbers demonic slasher flick that doesn't need much more than it's offering. And naturally, it was followed by several poorly-received sequels and remade (in 2009) with the possessed character being played by Shannon Elizabeth.

Answer: Mattress

At the end of "Hellraiser", Frank ends up killing Julia, seemingly by accident, but there's no real care on Frank's part. The problem is that it doesn't mean the end of Julia who, by that point, had already sold her soul in aiding Frank, bringing him back to life(-ish) and killing his brother, her husband, Larry.

Kristy encounters Julia in a new form in the sequel when a mattress containing her stepmother's blood is used as a portal to bring her back to the real world. While Julia is pulled back to Earth and rejuvenated, Kristy ends up drawing her back into Hell and she's dealt with accordingly. The only way Kristy is able to escape Hell and the Cenobites is by wearing Julia's skin, left behind when she's dragged into a wormhole.

"Hellraiser" kicked off a long-running and oft-ill-regarded franchise that pulled desperately away from Clive Barker's source material, often in an effort for Buena Vista Home Entertainment to retain the rights on short notice (as some of the films were made in only a couple of weeks to fit within the deadline). Nonetheless, the first two movies are often regarded as quite successful, with the first being a quite faithful adaptation of Barker's novella-- partly because he directed and adapted it for the screen himself.

Answer: Cropsy

Lumped in with all of that early-'80s summer camp enthusiasm, "The Burning" rarely gets its flowers, likely because it's overshadowed by so many similar films which blew up much bigger, both with recognizable horror icons and cult appreciation. In this one, Camp Blackfoot is besieged by Cropsy, a janitor who suffers severe burns after a prank is played on him at his place of work. He returns several years later, out for blood.

You might think-- hey, Cropsy sounds a lot like that New York urban legend. You'd be right; the creators banked on that. What they didn't bank on was keeping that in New York.

Notably, this movie contained the first feature film roles for "Seinfeld's" Jason Alexander and Oscar-winner Holly Hunter.