Even though it’s only January, Neon is cooking up a doozy of a summer camp experience for audiences this spring. They’ve just dropped the first poster for Hell of a Summer, the slasher directed by Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk, with a trailer set to arrive tomorrow, and it seems they’re promising plenty of bloody good fun.
The poster’s simple, an image of a faceless summer camp-goer wearing a Camp Pineway shirt, appropriately spattered in blood. It’s a callback to the many, many, many slashers that have been set at summer camps, all the way back to Friday the 13th, where the trend seemingly started. The film is set to follow a group of camp counselors terrorized by a masked killer (sound familiar?) the night before campers move in, so it seems like Wolfhard and Bryk aren’t straying too far from the established path when it comes to their directorial debut.
Both directors cited films like Shaun of the Dead as inspiration for the upcoming horror-comedy, but also Wes Anderson titles like Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, as well as Super Bad, indicating that there may not be as much blood and guts as some might be hoping. “I think what we kind of tried to do was just share the kind of films that Finn and I referenced so much in the writing of it and in the preparation for directing it, specifically with comedy,” Bryk told Collider when the film premiered.
Hell of a Summer originally premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, but it’s been a minute since we’ve heard anything about it. In that time, star Fred Hechinger has soared to Internet popularity thanks to his roles in both Thelma and last summer’s blockbuster Gladiator II, and Wolfhard has wrapped filming on the final season of Stranger Things.
The film also stars Abby Quinn, Pardis Saremi, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Krista Nazaire, Matthew Finlan, Julia Lalonde, Daniel Gravelle, Julia Doyle, Susan Coyne, Rosebud Baker, and Adam Pally, with Wolfhard and Bryk also making appearances as well.
Hell of a Summer hits theaters on April 18. Check out the new poster below:
