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Great Performances in Horror: Desiree Gould as Aunt Martha in Sleepaway Camp

Published

4 years ago

February 16, 2022

“There are no small parts. Only small actors.”

You might have heard this saying before. Usually, it comes right after you’ve been offered the role of Townsperson #9 in your high school production of The Music Man, but what it’s saying is true. It takes a great, inventive actor to make something out of very little stage or screen time and create something memorable.

Case in point: Desiree Gould as Aunt Martha in Sleepaway Camp.

Talk to anyone about this film and, the odds are, they’ll eventually bring up the endearingly quirky Aunt Martha as one of the most unforgettable parts of an already zany and memorable late-in-the-game slasher film.

Writer/director Robert Hiltzik fills his film with an assortment of some of the strangest characters to ever inhabit a slasher film. From the dynamic mean girl sister act of Judy and Meg (M-E-G) to the grotesque sex offender cook, the sleazy camp owner, and the group of foul-mouthed campers, Sleepaway Camp’s cast of characters is nothing if not unique.

Even within this already kooky group of characters, Aunt Martha stands out as uniquely bizarre. Her first appearance in the film is right after the prologue where a father and child are killed in a nasty boat accident and the surviving child, Angela, goes to live with cousin Ricky and Aunt Martha.

To say Martha is overly enthusiastic would be the understatement of the century. Gould busts in with a brown paper grocery bag full of snacks for the camp-bound Angela and Ricky as she belts her first lines to the rafters as if she’s playing to an imaginary audience of thousands at Radio City Music Hall. It’s a charmingly unmodulated, presentational performance that wouldn’t feel out of place in an early John Waters movie. At times, it’s like watching an alien approximating their own version of how a human behaves.

A fine drinking came could be made out of Gould’s daffy tic of turning to the camera, as an aside, resting her fingers on her chin, and saying “I’m afraid that wouldn’t do at all.” It becomes her catchphrase.

The moment where she remembers that she tied a red string around her finger so that she wouldn’t forget to tell Angela and Ricky something and then can’t remember what it was is a master class of bizarre cringe comedy. This woman is truly operating on another wavelength from the rest of us and, from the way Ricky reacts to his mother’s behavior, you get the sense that he’s pretty accustomed to it by now.

Perhaps most disturbing is that we find out that Martha isn’t just your run-of-the-mill, pill-addled, day-drinking housewife but a doctor herself. Can you imagine Martha performing surgery on you? Who would give this crackpot a scalpel?

Y’see, Martha has taken the liberty of filling out both Angela and Ricky’s physicals for them and makes sure to tell them not to let anyone know how they got them. Why would Martha do this? What’s she hiding? Gould’s big blue eyes dart around in such an unpredictable fashion that you can never get a good read on her. Is she just an oddball or is there something more sinister afoot?

70-ish minutes, several dead campers, and one Silly Putty mustache later, Aunt Martha returns during the surreal climactic reveal where we discover that Angela was originally Peter, and Martha decided to raise the child as Angela because she “always wanted a little girl.” At this point, Martha goes from being charmingly weird to full-on insane. She also mentions that her husband left her (big shocker) and that prevented her from having the little girl she always dreamed of. Martha, have you heard of adoption or a drunken one-night stand without protection? Not that anyone in their right mind would willingly give you another child to raise, but it’s worth a shot. Certainly makes more sense than the child abuse she forced on poor Angela. With this reveal, Martha becomes the true villain of the film.

To any actors out there, let this be a lesson to you. It doesn’t matter how much screen time or how many lines you have. If Desiree Gould could make something memorable out of Aunt Martha’s 3-minute appearance, you can, too. She remembers the old showbiz saying of always leaving them wanting more and, for me personally, she leaves me wanting to see an Aunt Martha medical drama spinoff. Imagine that character in the operating room causing drama. Just putting it out there.

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Shudder’s May Is the Best Month They’ve Had in a While.

Published

16 hours ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Shudder dropped their May 2026 programming slate and it is heavier than most months. The lead is The Terror: Devil in Silver, the long-awaited third installment of AMC’s horror anthology, premiering May 7 with new episodes weekly through June 11. Next up, Tales from the Crypt, all seven seasons, begins streaming May 1 after years off the market. Four new exclusive films fill out the rest of the month.

The Terror: Devil in Silver

The first two seasons of The Terror stand as some of the best horror television of the past decade. Season one sent the crew of HMS Terror on a doomed Arctic voyage in 1845. Season two, Infamy, placed its story inside a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Neither shared a cast nor a plot with the other. Both were exceptional. Season three takes Victor LaValle’s novel and builds it into a six-episode limited series. Dan Stevens plays Pepper, a working-class moving man who lands in a psychiatric hospital through bad luck and a worse temper. What he finds inside is not treatment.

Karyn Kusama, who directed the Yellowjackets pilot and earned an Emmy nomination for it, directs the opening two episodes and serves as co-executive producer. LaValle and Chris Cantwell co-wrote the scripts. Ridley Scott executive produces. The ensemble behind Stevens includes Judith Light, CCH Pounder, Aasif Mandvi, Stephen Root, and Marin Ireland. This is the kind of combination that earns attention before a single frame has aired.

New episodes premiere weekly after May 7.

Tales from the Crypt

Tales from the Crypt ran on HBO from 1989 to 1996. Seven seasons. Ninety-three episodes. Each one a self-contained story hosted by the Crypt Keeper, a wisecracking animated corpse voiced by John Kassir, who closes every episode with a pun only he finds funny.

The show pulled from EC Comics and assembled talent at a level that looks almost unreasonable in retrospect: Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, Christopher Reeve, Catherine O’Hara, and Steve Buscemi in front of the camera. Robert Zemeckis, Tobe Hooper, and William Friedkin behind it. Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael J. Fox also directed episodes.

The series has been effectively unavailable to stream for years, tied up in rights complications. It is now on Shudder. Season one drops May 1. Subsequent seasons premiere weekly on Fridays, with the final season 7 arriving June 12. Watch parties run every Friday at 9pm ET. There is no good reason to wait on this one.

The Exclusives

Whistle arrives May 8 and is the exclusive to prioritize. Directed by Corin Hardy, who made The Nun, and starring Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Percy Hynes White, and Nick Frost, it follows high school students who find an ancient Aztec Death Whistle and discover that blowing it summons their future deaths to hunt them down. Totally normal thing to happen.

Heresy lands May 1 and is worth knowing about before it arrives. Director Didier Konings is making his feature debut after years as a concept artist on Stranger Things, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Smothered arrives May 29 as a Shudder Original. It is Indonesian, and it is produced by Joko Anwar, the director behind Satan’s Slaves and Impetigore. That name means something to anyone who has been paying attention to international horror over the past decade. The film follows a micro-painting artist who loses part of his memory in an accident and returns home to find a woman claiming to be his mother.

This Is Not a Test streams May 22. Directed by Adam MacDonald and adapted from Courtney Summers’ 2012 novel, it stars Olivia Holt as a student sheltering in a high school during a zombie outbreak.

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[Exclusive Clip] ‘From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle’

Published

2 days ago

April 26, 2026

Ryan T. Cusick

Audiences are invited to explore one of Vermont’s most mysterious regions in From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle, arriving later this month on streaming platforms and DVD.

The documentary will debut on April 28, 2026, on platforms including Apple TV, Prime Video, and Google Play. DVD editions will be available exclusively through the Small Town Monsters online shop.

Directed by Seth Breedlove, the film continues the company’s exploration of folklore, cryptids, and unexplained phenomena. Breedlove’s previous work includes The Mothman of Point Pleasant, On the Trail of Bigfoot, American Werewolves, and more than two dozen feature-length productions. In total, Small Town Monsters has released more than thirty films, along with investigative programs, web series, books, podcasts, and exclusive membership content.

From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle was made possible through the support of backers from the company’s 2025 Kickstarter campaign.

Set in rural Vermont, the documentary examines the legend of the Bennington Triangle, an area associated with reports of UFOs, ghosts, phantom lights, mysterious creatures, and a series of unexplained disappearances. At the center of the mystery is Glastenbury Mountain, where decades of unanswered questions continue to inspire speculation.

Going beyond folklore and campfire tales, the film asks a chilling question: Why is Glastenbury Mountain so inexplicable, and what happened to those who went missing?

Check out our exclusive clip below.

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This Week in Horror: DC Goes Full Body Horror, A24 Has Its Chainsaw Man, and The Bone Temple Is Finally Yours

Published

4 days ago

April 24, 2026

Luna Gray

Good week. The Clayface trailer dropped and made DC relevant to this website for the first time in a while, A24 put a director on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reimagining, and we got some interviews worth reading. Here is all of it.

Clayface Has a Trailer, and It Is Exactly What You Want

The Clayface trailer landed Wednesday, and it is DC’s first real horror film. Not horror adjacent. Not dark. Horror. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, an actor whose face gets disfigured by a gangster. He turns to a scientist, played by Naomi Ackie, who transforms his body into clay. Then the body horror starts.

James Watkins directed, which is the right choice. He made Speak No Evil and before that The Woman in Black, and he understands how to make dread feel physical. The screenplay is by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. That combination should tell you everything about the tone they are going for.

A24 Has a Director for Texas Chainsaw Massacre and His Last Film Cost Under a Million Dollars

Deadline confirmed that Curry Barker is writing and directing A24’s reimagining of the 1974 original. Barker made Obsession for under a million dollars. Focus Features paid north of fifteen million to distribute it. It sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. A24 hired him before it even opens, which opens May 15.

Kim Henkel, who co-created the original with Tobe Hooper, is executive producing his own creation’s reimagining. That is either a blessing or a haunting. Probably both.

Astrolatry Is Going to Cannes and We Talked to the Actor Who Faced the Creature

Astrolatry is heading to the Frontières Buyers Showcase on May 16-17. The film has a sentient severed penis that grows into a ten-foot practical creature with spiky teeth. We interviewed star Ethan Daniel Corbett about what it was actually like to act against it. Short answer: genuinely terrifying. Long answer is on the site.

The Bone Temple Is Home

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple hit 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD on Tuesday. If you held out from the digital release in February, now is the time. The 4K presentation is supposed to be great. Extras include audio commentary and a deleted scene. If your gonna watch The Bone Temple, why not watch it where the snacks are better.