Bury Me At Camp Blood
The 2009 remake of Friday the 13th is, by most conceivable metrics, a bad movie. Cacophonous, slapdash, and dutifully uninspired in its pursuit of tits and guts, the movie is a chore even in the forgiving eyes of horror gorehounds. But on the southwestern edge of Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, on the giant screen of The Mahoning Drive-In—the largest still showing movies on 35mm film—it’s intoxicating. Not because of some magical idyllic drive-in experience, but for the deep, strange siren song of this drive-in, and the Gathering of the Juggalos–esque events it hosts every year. There are lawn games, costume contests, and raffles. People pitch tents and set up campers, they unfold card tables and have potlucks, spread out blankets and camp chairs and spooky lamps to make it easy for friends to find them in the dark between movies. Almost everyone here is from somewhere else, and none of them care how bad the movie is. They like the movies, sure, but they love The Mahoning.
People are lured to this place. That’s how most encounter it—someone brings you, serves as a guide, an evangelist. Something makes visitors want to share it with others immediately, in no small part thanks to the spectacle of events like Camp Blood, an annual celebration of slasher movies. This is my third Camp Blood; I first came here because a friend brought me, and this time I want to know how others found their way to this unremarkable patch of the Poconos. I speak to a gaggle of friends, many of which are connected by a man from New Hampshire named Keith. He united a bunch of movie fans from Boston and Ohio and inspired them to make the long drive down to Lehighton for the Mahoning. I was eager to meet Keith, but unfortunately, he was busy mainlining another triple feature at another repertory house, The Gap Theatre in Wind Gap, Penn., a 48-minute drive from the triple feature that began here at sunset.
“[Keith] was like, ‘the programming at this drive-in is incredible,” one of the friends, a man named Desmond, tells me. “And then one year I had to go because they played The Valley of Gwangi, which is a dinosaur movie I’m quite fond of from the ’60s … that got me out here, and it’s the first drive-in I’ve ever been to.”
Programming is The Mahoning’s special sauce—both the way that it’s presented via events like Camp Blood, and for its eclectic selection of genre films from the beloved to the obscure. Some are charmed by the mere idea of a drive-in, but a drive-in that regularly makes a fuss over an Evil Dead marathon? That’s what attracts people like Mike and Melissa, a married couple in their 40s who found out about The Mahoning from a friend’s post on Facebook in 2015, and now come once or twice a month, making friends with people like Desmond and, of course, Keith. They form a loose unit, often coordinating visits.
“Keith and I, we text,” says Mike. “It’s not an everyday kind of thing, but you know—hey what event do you want to come to?“
This sort of dynamic, repeated over and over again, is how The Mahoning has grown and thrived in the beloved, but barely profitable business of drive-in cinema.
“We don’t pay for advertising,” says Virgil Cardamone, owner, operator, and curator of The Mahoning, when I call him to talk about how grassroots everyone’s stories are. It is, after all, how he himself discovered the theater a decade ago. “Everybody is connected to this place because a friend was like, ‘you gotta come.'”
The Mahoning, the story goes—you can watch a documentary about it—used to play first-run movies, like many of the remaining drive-ins in the country, big studio movies that would appeal as widely as possible. But in the mid-2010s, when studios transitioned to digital distribution for exhibitors, The Mahoning’s longtime owner, the late Jeff Mattox, did the math and saw no way forward. He could not upgrade to digital projection and keep The Mahoning open. Mattox would have to try something risky, and become a repertory theater, screening whatever he could get on 35mm, committing to the same old projectors that the theater had relied on for its entire history.
The gambit was a success. Now under Cardamone’s stewardship, the theater has become a destination for genre lovers of all stripes, with programming that appeals to misfits and obsessives: There’s a lot of horror, but you could also catch John Waters hosting a Filthy Film Fest (with several of his own films) in 2023; a Walter Hill action movie extravaganza, and, in a regular tradition, The Wizard of Oz kicking off every season in April.
One gets the sense that everyone who sets foot on the frankly meager-looking lot in the borough of Lehighton immediately clocks it as special. It can be difficult to ascertain why. Despite its location in the resort-filled Poconos, The Mahoning occupies one of the least scenic pockets in the region, drab compared to the mountain-town charm of nearby Jim Thorpe. But there is the screen and the old cinderblock concession stand, and maybe everyone who sees them knows deep down that they are the same structures that have been there since the Mahoning opened in 1949. That there is history here they’re taking part of, helping sustain. If you visit The Mahoning once, you are part of its story. There aren’t many places that make you feel that way.
Previous experiences with drive-ins were different. Generally, they reflected what movies taught me to expect: You sit in the car with your romantic partner, adjust the seats to a more comfortable position, one where you can put your arm around them before realizing after a few seconds that the center console on modern cars makes canoodling impossible and you should’ve come in a ’57 Chevy Bel Air. Then you go get some concessions when the retro ad reel tells you to. Balancing a cardboard tray on your lap, you lean back and say “this is nice” to your partner, who will smile and nod and say the same thing 30 minutes later. The movie is almost irrelevant. You are at the drive-in, Having An Experience. You are also in your car, and the car is doing what cars do everywhere: reducing other people to abstractions. Isolating you from the world.
The Mahoning’s collection of misfits, with their canopies and potlucks and word-of-mouth buzz, runs counter to this, and what the drive-in stood for during its mid-20th century peak, when over 4,000 of them dotted the United States. (Fewer than 10 percent of those remain today, with some 300-odd drive-ins still in operation.) As affordable automobiles and the Interstate Highway System provided new ways to market American autonomy and individualism, the drive-in became a way to exercise those new perks, a public expression of private indulgence. This particular romance has not diminished in our pop cultural imagination. Even if you never go to one, the experience is easily conjured—others present but also invisible, your vehicle a comfort but also a ward against disruption. Social and antisocial all at once.
Perhaps The Mahoning’s special connection with horror fans supercharges the feeling of community that runs counter to the archetypal drive-in fantasy. More than most any other kind of film, people will offer to watch horror movies with you. Like strange mall goth missionaries, they will proselytize, making passionate pleas to expand your media diet, gently asserting that it is in desperate need of dismemberment, possession, mania, or some other form of perversion.
Generally speaking, the horror fan knows their taste is an acquired one. They also know it is infectious, and wait, patiently, for the right opportunity to share their macabre diversion with someone else. Then—like the character played by a fan-favorite actor with second billing in a zombie film—you’re bit, and you have to figure out how you’re going to deal with that. For me, the answer was simple: I had to start going to The Mahoning every year.
Different events and films draw different crowds. This year, The Mahoning decided to kick off October with a screening of Practical Magic, accompanied by a candlelight market for local vendors to come and sell their wares. There are tents offering tarot readings and occult art, handmade candles, indie publishers, glass ornaments, used books and movies, all accompanied by a pre-show reel of appropriately spooky footage on the Mahoning’s massive screen. It’s here I learn that while horror was my gateway to the Mahoning, maybe there’s something else happening alongside the jumpscares, some other void this place fills for those who keep coming back.
“I think it just feels especially real and grounding here,” says Micki Dawson, under a canopy he decorated with lights along with his wife, Kaitlynn, who lounges on cushions nearby. “It’s just an exceptionally present and in-the-moment place, especially with everything else in the world. It’s just very tangible.”
For Jacob Jones-Goldstein, who moonlights as managing editor of the Delaware artist collective Oddity Prodigy Productions, that solidness is important, a bulwark against the flattening force of AI:
“The kind of people that come to these things, that you talk to at events like this, are people who are interested in supporting art and creativity and that life and that spark that comes along with that,” Goldstein says. “And it feels like the world at large doesn’t support that anymore … You know, it’s like breathing for some people. And that’s the most important thing and that’s what they’re here to support. And that’s what we’re trying to support.”
Wandering the candlelight market, I talk to people who are looking for a community beyond the idiosyncrasies of genre fandom, one rooted in the tangibility that a projector showing movies on 35mm in the outdoors represents. I catch Maria, a young woman from Scranton, wandering back from the concession stand with a gaggle of friends, and talk to her about her love of film. She tells me she came for the first time 10 years ago with an ex-boyfriend. Donnie Darko was playing and it gave her an itch to see as many movies on film as possible, regularly checking The Mahoning’s listings and making an effort to come whenever they’re playing something she’s not seen. She brings friends when she can, it’s never a hard sell—with the exception of one friend who “doesn’t care much about film.”
Cinephiles have many reasons for holding film in such high esteem, many of them qualitative and well-argued: the richness of the image, the depth of color, even the grain that lets you know that something real is being projected, not the razor-sharp data of a digital file. At a drive-in like The Mahoning, however, film feels wonderfully imperfect. The prints of some films are old and beat-up, the colors on older movies like Halloween have faded over time, the sound broadcast over FM radio is tinny and lacking in depth. The magic isn’t in watching the movies in their ideal form, but watching them in this form, with a specific print’s impurities, its audio echoing uniquely through a lot that carries sound through the open air in way that will never be 1:1 with another drive-in lot, or even the same lot on a different night. It’s also impermanent. That’s part of the magic too: You are watching something in danger of fading away.
This might explain why so many people are eager to make memories here. Over the summer, my Mahoning guide, a D.C. political journalist named Matt Cohen, made a smaller trip to the drive-in, with just his girlfriend Kiki and her brother. He called ahead, asked them if they’d play Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” during the pre-show while the sun was still out, and he asked her to marry him. He’s not the first. People propose, and even get married at The Mahoning all the time. Cardamone tells me that they average one big wedding a year, with lots of smaller celebrations throughout. He quotes his mentor and predecessor, Jeff Mattox.
“It is the ultimate compliment, you know? That people love us so much that they want to make [The Mahoning] part of their special day and place.”
Back at this year’s Camp Blood, I spot a school bus toward the back of the lot. It’s one of those short ones, obviously converted into some kind of camper. There’s a canopy erected next to it, and two big portable recliners underneath, a card table set up in front of them. It’s the nicest setup I’ve seen, like a living room imported to the edge of this field. I had to meet the people who did this.
Their names are Tori and Heather. Married 27 years, Tori is gentle with glasses and a librarian’s demeanor; Heather wears wraparound shades and speaks in short sentences, her hair pulled tightly back into a ponytail. The school bus is her project, an incredibly impressive conversion with everything you’d need to live on the road for a while, there’s even linoleum on the floor. I ask if Heather’s a mechanic.
“No, just a weirdo,” Heather says. “Watch a lot of YouTube videos and figure stuff out.” They come to the drive-in two or three weekends a month, making the four-hour drive in the bus with all their gear. They largely keep to themselves, but they appreciate the oddball crowd just the same.
“There really is a sense of community, you know?” Tori says. “[With] the different types of moves that they show—you know that people are into the same kind of things you are into. Like when we went to the John Waters film festival… it’s like the weirdo in me sees the weirdo in you. And instantly you know, you have some common bonds.”
I find some common bonds with Tori and Heather. They ask me my favorite horror movie, like the annoying critic I am I say it changes every day but right now it’s The Shining. We talk about whether vampire movies are better than zombie movies. Tori says she likes horror movies for their psychological richness, Heather tells me that she likes them for the same reason she tricked her grandmother into letting her see Return of the Living Dead when she was seven: they’re just badass. Horror movies are part of their marriage, and by proxy, so is The Mahoning.
“I believe that you got to take care of the people and things that you love,” Tori says, “Because if you don’t, if you just assume someone else is going to take care of it…”
“It doesn’t happen,” Heather says.
“You gotta do what you know is right, and support the things that are good,” Tori finishes. “So that’s why we come here.”
People love to call all sorts of secular gatherings “church”: sports, political rallies, and yes, movie theaters. I suspect it’s because it is unusual, in an individualistic society hostile toward the idea of connection, for people to gather. It is suspect, and most involve some form of zeal, or mania. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s a little crazy, to drive for hours through the Poconos to sit in a field and watch old movies all night, eating cheap concession stand food and grow damp from the dew that will soak through your blankets as the clock creeps past midnight. I’m no expert. I just know that the image flickering on the screen takes on a different quality outside of an auditorium designed to make you forget you’re in a crowd. At the drive-in, you can’t forget that you’re with others, and how far you came to be here. An empty theater is a comfort; an empty drive-in is a tragedy.
Do you like horror movies, by the way? Because I know a place.
