Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard met as actors on the Ghostbusters: Afterlife shoot, realised they had similar tastes and decided to write a movie together. Hell of a Summer is the result. It’s an “everyone dies” slasher set at a summer camp where counsellors have assembled before the kids arrive to have some bongs’n’beers before settling down to their more serious duties.
Gruesome comic death is the idea, which Bryk and Wolfhard establish in a pre-credits sequence in which a guitar played around a camp fire ends up where campfire guitars should probably end up more often, and both the senior counsellors at this remote place take a one-way journey to eternity.
After which we meets the rest of the guys and gals, a bag of Gen Z stereotypes laid out like a smorgasbord for our killer to pick away at – among them the virtue-signalling vegan, the up-himself hot guy, the unbearable spiritual one, the self-obsessed hypochondriac, the Insta-influencer always checking her make-up, the neuraesthenic lover of musical theatre, and so on. Wolfhard and Bryk write themselves into the mix and play a pair of lairy lads hoping to get laid now they’re counsellors. Their characters are (selflessly) more decorative than functional – neither really hogs the action and Chris (Wolfhard) and Bobby (Bryk) are just as infatuated with themselves as the rest of their fellow counsellors.
The focus, though, is on two characters who have signally failed to launch. Jason (Fred Hechinger) is the perma-child too old at 24 even to be at a summer camp. And Claire (Abby Quinn) the nerd who looks like she might be the “final girl” from the moment she arrives on the screen. A nice little double act here by Hechinger and Quinn.
So that’s your gang. Bryk and Wolfhard, who also direct, give them a good hard shake and then introduce a masked killer. Who’ll be next to die? And more to the point, will their punishment fit the crime (see guitar guy)?
Bryk and Wolfhard claim Shaun of the Dead as an influence, but they have seen a lot more horror than that. Friday 13th, Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer are the obvious references, and the tinkling and growling soundtrack (by Jay McCarrol) at times also suggests both John Carpenter and Dario Argento in the same motif. Neat.
The situation isn’t novel but Bryk and Wolfhard’s depiction of the dreadfuls gives it fresh legs, even if they are pitched into the slaughter before we’ve properly got to know them. Oh, we’re at the killing bit already, I thought.
While I’m in quibbling mode, comedy and horror is a tough tightrope to walk and I wondered whether Bryk and Wolfhard were having second thoughts about the comedy side of it once they got going. There is some unsettling death in here and some icky imagery. The guy who has a nut allergy being approached by the masked killer with a blade dipped into peanut butter – that doesn’t quite stack up as a logical idea (he’ll be dead before the allergic reaction gets going, surely) but it has a disturbing visual power.
Bryk and Wolfhard struggled to get this film financed. Wolfhard wasn’t yet 20 and his age counted against him when they were hawking it around. But in the end they did and things have turned out OK. Their characters are fresh and entertainingly unlikeable and Bryk and Wolfhard have something to say about the 21st-century tendency to come to Insta-judgements about everything. I’d like them to make another horror movie, but really go for broke next time.
Hell of a Summer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
