The 2023 Netflix doc Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare gets four stars for content, and about 2.5 for ambition and curiosity. The film centers on Steve Cartisano, the man who is probably most responsible for the contemporary incarnation of “wilderness therapy” camps that are marketed, both online and through media coverage, to parents as solutions for “troubled teens.” If you follow the career of Paris Hilton or have a modicum of historical sense, you’ll guess that the therapeutic miracles these camps promise are rare, and the disciplinary methods are closer to those found in an unregulated prison.
The film includes footage from the Utah and Caribbean sites of Cartisano-sponsored camps from the 80s and 90s that is truly harrowing. These teenagers are literally taken from their homes in the dead of night by strangers, put on a plane to an unknown-to-them location, and then left in a harsh environment for days, weeks, or months, presumably to treat addiction, mental health, and/or ill-defined “attitude” problems.1 You would call this kidnapping except the parents approve of and pay (up to tens of thousands of dollars) for the privilege.
The interviews with former campers are illuminating, and the footage itself is further evidence that if narcissists have cameras, they will not hesitate to film themselves committing all sorts of legal and ethical infractions. However, I was a little disappointed that the largely hands-off editorial style of the documentary didn’t follow up on some questions the interviews left me with. How is the staff trained? Are they trained at all? One interviewee discloses that some staff members are former campers. How are they selected? And relatedly, what is the process by which some of the kids are recruited and instrumentalized to deliver discipline on their peers? What was the racial breakdown of campers? Does the high price tag appeal to a certain (Paris Hilton) economic strata of American society? How does that play out?
But what troubled me most was the documentary’s lack of interest in historical context and sensitivity. One of the most enthusiastic former staffers, who went by the nickname “Horsehair” (eye-roll emoji), makes the baffling claim that Cartisano was “ahead of his time.” This statement was left unchallenged, but true crime consumers will call bullshit. In fact, imprisoning tweens and teenagers against their will in the Americas has a rich and shameful history. The work of Connie Walker and Josie Duffy Rice will tell you plenty about the way children, specifically Black, Brown, and Indigenous children, were taken from their families and forced into programs that decimated their cultural heritage and broke their bodies for most of the twentieth century. If you feel up to it this early in the new year, I can’t recommend Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory highly enough. It uses the conventions of horror fiction to explore the story of her uncle’s death in a Florida reformatory school in the 1950s. I don’t know if I will ever be able to read it again, but it has a permanent place in my library. “Reparative” and “conversion” camps for LGBTQ youth also have a place in this discussion, and give me an opportunity to ask for your opinion on another text that understandably turns to horror, in this case cinematic, to explore its subject matter: the 2022 film They/Them.2
But back to Paris Hilton. She has admirably used her fame to expose the abusive fraud these camps are running on vulnerable kids and (some) well-meaning families. This documentary, though I wish it were a little more contextualized, does the same. We should be aware of this latest iteration of child abuse, and we should shut it down.
Are you thinking of women being institutionalized for laziness, novel reading, and egotism? SAME.
Full disclosure: I loved this movie, but its reception has been divisive. Seriously, let me know what you think in the comments if you’ve seen it.
Interesting stuff, and some knowledgeable commentary, thank you! I’ll have to have a look into this. Maybe it’s not exactly relaxing weekend viewing, though.