Dead of Summer Is Not Just a Standard Slasher Series, It's Your Next Anthology Obsession

With a title like that, Freeform’s vacation offering “Dead of Summer” is inviting any number of headline puns: “dead on arrival,” “dead in the water,” “dead boring,” et cetera, ad nauseum. The puns would not be entirely wrong, either; “Dead Of Summer” is a very silly new show that samples nearly every available cliché in the summer-camp-horror genre all at once, making for a messy homage to “Friday The 13th” that reads partly as satire and partly as meditative gothic horror. Nearly every scene in the first three episodes sent to critics is laden with some kind of terrible portent, which I know because the score histrionically hits the strings every time something is supposed to be shocking. That, and usually someone screams. In the astonishingly bad first episode, our bland protagonist Amy (Elizabeth Lail) screams in horror upon encountering: a mouse, a ghost holding a balloon, her own memories, a cute cop she already has a crush on, a dead body, a boy holding a video camera and a bloody deer.

But “Dead of Summer” does have a satisfying campy layer — new headline pun: “putting the camp back in summer camp!” — which lays it on thick with the lurking horror of the woods around Camp Stillwater and the implausibly sophisticated secrets of this batch of horny teenagers. The story follows a group of camp counselors who stumble into a small town teeming with demon worshippers and disgruntled ghosts. The teens are quickly plagued by nightmares that stir up both their own individual demons and create encounters with the haunted spiritual plane of the cursed Lake Stillwater. But of course, no one goes home, because they are too excited to be teenagers free of their parents for a few weeks. In the grand tradition of moralizing terror, alcohol use, drug use and eating disorders each get dinged for creating vulnerabilities for evil to prey on innocents in the first few episodes, though I am putting that a lot more succinctly than the episode manages to. Mostly, “Dead of Summer” is insinuation and visual tricks, where paper-thin characters are either supposed to be scary or scared.

Beyond the crowded, confusing pilot — which shoves characters’ secrets, standing feuds and clandestine romances at the viewer with all the delicacy of a speeding truck — later episodes of “Dead of Summer” are more comprehensible.