Home
Limelight
Camping Nightmares: Five Crazy Sleeping Bag Deaths from Horror Movies

Camping Nightmares: Five Crazy Sleeping Bag Deaths from Horror Movies

Riccardo DannoLimelightYesterday101 Views

It’s camping season. At least I think it is. Actually, I have no idea. I’m more of a hotel guy. I’ve seen way too much death in the great outdoors. At least in the movies.

Plus, sleeping bags are death traps. Don’t believe me? Then I respectfully enter these five examples into evidence.

“Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood” (1988)

Jason Voorhees had already survived a vicious onslaught from Corey Feldman (something we, as a society, have yet to achieve) and returned from the dead to continue mowing through teenagers with an assortment of gardening tools.

But surprisingly, for a franchise rooted in summer camp lore, they waited an awfully long time to have Jason just wrap someone up in their sleeping bag and bash them to death against a tree. They wouldn’t wait that long again…

“Jason X” (2001)

Just three films later we got the obligatory “in space” installment in the “Friday the 13th” franchise. Reviled by many, I would argue it’s the best one since the original more than 20 years prior. All pretense is out the window as we dive intentionally into self-parody. And it’s fun.

Jason, cryogenically frozen for more than 400 years, awakens on a spaceship in the year 2455. (Don’t ask, just go with it.) Obviously, he’s still got murder on his mind, and despite all their gadgetry and scientific know-how, crew members begin dropping just as easily as their dimwitted camp counselor ancestors.

In the movie’s best scene, they try to confuse Jason by luring him onto a holodeck and setting it to “Crystal Lake, Nineteen-Hundred-Eighty.” Jason finds himself in a virtual reality simulation of his old stomping grounds, where two nubile young girls try to tempt him with alcohol, marijuana, and – GASP! – the dreaded premarital sex.

They pop their tops and hop into their sleeping bags, only to have Jason bash them to death against each other. And then a tree. Ain’t space grand?

“Rats: Night of Terror” (1984)

There is simply nothing like Italian Horror from the ’70s and ’80s… especially when the writer-director team of Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, and Rosella Drudi were involved.

This one’s pretty simple: A biker gang roaming the post-apocalyptic world think they’ve found an old ghost town to hunker down for the night. And then… rats. Followed by a night of terror.

One of the biker chicks makes the mistake of getting into a sleeping bag with a bad zipper, and she’s stuck in their while a rat burrows into her… well, I’ll let you use your imagination.

Minutes later, when her cohorts find her corpse, they watch in, yes, terror as her mouth opens and the rat emerges. A simple trick achieved by the actress wearing a rat “puppet” on her tongue.

FYI, Fragasso and Drudi, married until her death earlier this year, are responsible for one of the greatest “bad” movies of all time, 1990’s “Troll 2.”

“Night of the Demon” (1980)

This is a Bigfoot movie, but it’s no “Harry and the Hendersons.” This sasquatch impregnates a human woman, disembowels a guy and swings his intestines overhead like a lasso, and, in the film’s most outrageous scene, rips a man’s dick off while he’s peeing in the bushes.

He also happens upon a young man sleeping peacefully out in the great wide open. Does he show mercy? Hell no. He picks him up, sleeping bag and all, twirls him around several times and lets him fly. He ends up impaled on a tree branch, hanging upside down while the blood flows up his neck and all over his face.

“Prophecy” (1979)

Decades before “South Park” brought us ManBearPig, director John Frankenheimer served up this eco horror trashterpiece featuring a gigantic mutant bear. Twisted out of proportion by a New England paper mill’s toxic waste, this thing runs amok and starts killing.

As sleeping bag deaths go, this one isn’t the most graphic, but it’s shocking in its sheer brutality. As the bear-thing attacks his campsite, a young kid jumps up, still in his sleeping bag, and tries to hop away. But the bear-thing swats him so hard, he goes flying into a nearby boulder.

This poor boy hits that thing harder than Wyle E. Coyote ever smashed into a rock wall with a tunnel painted on it; such is the force of the impact that his sleeping bag explodes in a snowstorm of feathery down. Truly absurd, yet incredibly effective.