The Scare Salon

Before I get too far into this, I want to note up front that I would highly suggest going into this film completely blind, because while it is marketed as a summer camp horror and does play out that way for most of its runtime, it has a pretty big “twist” that I admit I did not see coming but which made the movie much, much better, at least in my opinion. I’m not going to spoil what the twist is, but suffice it to say that it almost puts the film in another subgenre entirely and made me appreciate the first part of the film a lot more. As always, your mileage may vary, but I thought Marshmallow was a solid flick, a fun time all the way through.

At the beginning, we meet our main protagonist, Morgan (Kue Lawrence), who looks about twelve or thirteen years old. He’s having dinner with his parents and his cool granddad Roy (Corbin Bernsen), who he’s clearly very close to. It’s been established that Morgan suffers from frequent nightmares, particularly a recurring one where his bedroom is filling up with water, and then water begins shooting out of a hole in his stomach.

It’s also established that Morgan is being sent to summer camp for the first time ever, and he is very much NOT happy about it. Morgan is a small, shy boy with few friends, especially since his family moved to the neighborhood not long before, and he’s not relishing being stuck out in the woods with a bunch of kids who are likely going to bully him just like the ones at home do.

His parents are kindly insistent, though, thinking that it will be good for the kid to get out of his comfort zone. His grandpa also helps out, telling Morgan that he met some of his best friends at camp, and slipping the boy a pocket knife as a gift while his parents aren’t looking.

Only minutes after this heartwarming exchange, however, Roy suffers a massive heart attack and collapses dead on the kitchen floor. So devastated Morgan not only has to deal with his grief at losing the person he was closest to, but he still has to go off to summer camp alone, leaving his parents behind when he perhaps needs them most. And as the cherry on the shit sundae, he’ll be sharing a cabin with an older kid named CJ (Sutton Johnston), who is the son of his parents’ friends and is kind of a bullying dick.

Once he arrives at camp, he meets all the counselors, who consist of a no-nonsense, kinda alpha bitch named Rachel (Giorgia Whigham), an obnoxious gym bro named Kaszwar (Pierson Fodé) and his fawning girlfriend Laurie (Samantha Neyland Trumbo), a kind, compassionate young man named Franklin (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper), a stoner named Avery (Geoffrey James), and the camp director, a dad-joke spewing middle-aged dude named Collins (Paul Soter).

Morgan also pretty much immediately gets targeted by bullies, especially after he opts out of the swim test because of his crippling fear of water. On the plus side, he does manage to join in with a few of the camp’s other losers and outcasts, Dirk (Max Malas), Raj (Winston Vengapally), and Sam (Dylan Friedman). Best of all, though, he befriends a cute, bookish girl named Pilar (Kai Cech), who seems really into him and is easily the best character in the movie.

So the usual summer camp stuff takes place, and not long into the festivities, the obligatory “scary story around the campfire” scene takes place. The story in this case concerns a doctor who used to live on the very property where the camp now stands. During the day he was a respected surgeon, but at night, he did horrible experiments on people in the basement of his house, sewing limbs together willy-nilly. When his wife found out what he was up to, the doctor sewed his wife and their two kids together to make a sort of Frankenfamily creature. Later on, after the doctor’s crimes were discovered, the place was razed and the camp was built over it. Sometimes at night, though, if a kid leaves his cabin after lights-out, the doctor will come after him through the woods, looking for fresh organs and limbs to experiment on.

After Rachel finishes telling the story, Kaszwar jumps out and scares the crap out of some of the kids, even though most of them have been to the camp before and have heard the story in previous summers. Pilar walks Morgan back to his cabin, and Morgan nervously asks if the doctor story is true. Pilar lovingly teases him about being afraid, but reassures him that it’s just a creepy story the counselors tell every year.

Morgan tries to believe her, but he’s still pretty nervous when he goes back to his cabin and tries to sleep. He has another nightmare, and in this one his grandfather is sitting at a dinner table across from him acting kinda scary, and there are also flashes of the grandpa looking as though he’s pulling Morgan out of the water, seen from Morgan’s point of view.

Morgan wakes up, and then notices that there’s a weird, strobing light coming from somewhere outside. He also sees that his roommate CJ is not in his bed. Apprehensive, he peers out the cabin window and sees bright white lights emerging from another cabin across the way. Though he’s terrified, he sets out to see what’s going on, and long story short, when he gets in the cabin, he sees a man in what looks like a sort of hazmat suit, apparently operating on what looks to be CJ’s corpse.

He flees from the cabin, trying to tell the others that the doctor from the story is real, but of course no one believes him, especially since all the counselors know that he’s prone to nightmares. Not long after, though, the doctor emerges from the cabin and starts taking out kids left and right, and panic understandably ensues.

As I mentioned, though, right here is where the big reveal of the movie starts to unspool, and though I’m not going to say specifically what it is, I will say that it’s an unexpected and sort of refreshing spin on the summer camp slasher subgenre that initially seems like it came out of nowhere, but was actually set up really carefully all through the first part of the movie if you go back and look. Horror films about people being stalked at a camp or somewhere in the woods are a dime a dozen, of course, so it was really cool to see a fairly clever variation on the theme, and one that actually had some depth to it beyond “crazy murderer targeting victims in the wilderness.”

Marshmallow doesn’t have the copious gore you might expect from a run of the mill slasher, but I didn’t mind that at all, since the movie is just using the tropes and clichés of the summer camp subgenre to do something different. Overall I found this a very enjoyable flick with believable kid actors who were thankfully not annoying and largely pretty endearing, and a somewhat convoluted but original plot twist that improved the entire movie in hindsight. Not everyone will be into it, but it’s a decently entertaining film for fans of stuff like Sleepaway Camp, Friday the 13th, or especially The Cabin in the Woods.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.