History of the site
SleepawayCampMovies.com: The Official Website began in 1998 as an homage website founded by Jeff Hayes and John Klyza titled simply: Sleepaway Camp: The Website. The two superfans built an online campground of information about the movies for fans worldwide to enjoy and expand the fanbase.
Klyza put his designing and writing talents to use while Hayes provided written, video, and visual content as he tracked down actors and crew from the movies and did interviews for the website. Hayes’ interviews with Jonathan “Ricky” Tiersten and Felissa “Angela” Rose were the first interviews with these actors to ever appear online and caused quite a stir. Suddenly the website began getting an incredible amount of online traffic, as news of the interviews and website spread across the information superhighway.
During a weekend spent with Felissa Rose in New York, Hayes tracked down reclusive director Robert Hiltzik and spoke to the creator of Sleepaway Camp for the first time. The trio immediately began planning to make a new Sleepaway movie and with the support of rightsholder Hiltzik and his wife Michelle, the website became the official website of Sleepaway Camp.
In 2001, Klyza decided to make a website dedicated exclusively to the sequels and with the help of sequel director Michael Simpson, launched SleepawayCampFilms.com. Hayes continued ownership and webmaster duties for SleepawayCampMovies.com and teamed up with talented web designer/coding expert Tania to continue to provide fans with the best resource for Sleepaway Camp online.
SleepawayCampMovies.com is proud to be the first and only horror movie series website to provide completely new content featuring characters from the series reprising their roles for short films. Coverage of the movies, their re-releases, and events continues to evolve on the website with a large library of exclusive video content produced by Hayes to provide fans with an online experience that continues to bring the fans closer to Camp than ever.
Writing & Production: Jeff Hayes
Jeff Hayes is co-creator/content producer of the first official SLEEPAWAY CAMP website, which launched in 1998. He is responsible for tracking down star Felissa “Angela” Rose and creator/director Robert Hiltzik in the late ’90s, reuniting them for the first SLEEPAWAY DVD release in 2000, and bringing them into the spotlight to face their worldwide accumulated SLEEPAWAY CAMP fandom for the first time.
In 2000, with the support of rightsholder Hiltzik, Hayes turned the website into SleepawayCampMovies.com: the official website of SLEEPAWAY CAMP. Hayes also reunited much of the original cast on stage in New York City to a sold-out crowd at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors in 2001.
He was the driving force behind getting Robert Hiltzik to write and direct a new SLEEPAWAY film, RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP, which was released in 2008 from Magnolia Pictures. Hiltzik originally intended not to bring back any characters from the original film, but entirely rewrote the script and added Ronnie, Ricky, and Angela upon the insistence of Hayes.
A filmmaker himself, responsible for the cult 30-minute short “Grandma’s Secret Recipe” in 2002, “Behind the Scenes of Return to Sleepaway Camp” in 2008, and the feature film “Ghoulish”, Hayes is often called back into action to produce bonus features for SLEEPAWAY CAMP-related media. Most recently, he co-produced 2 documentaries for SCREAM FACTORY’s Blu-ray releases of SLEEPAWAY CAMP II and III, arranging most of the interviews for the documentaries and producing a large volume of additional video content exclusively for the website.
He continues friendships with many of the cast and crew from all of the SLEEPAWAY movies, often including them in his movie projects.
Design & Development: Tania
Tania discovered SLEEPAWAY CAMP during her early teenage summers, when she and her cousins would head to the local video store, pick something from the horror section, and take it back to their grandmother’s basement to watch. Horror movies were a nightly ritual.
Back then, choosing what to watch usually came down to the VHS cover and whatever was written on the back. Neither was necessarily a reliable indication of what you were about to get. One night, SLEEPAWAY CAMP III got the vote based on its cover alone. It was Tania’s introduction to SLEEPAWAY CAMP, and after watching the rest of the series, it quickly became a favorite. Of all the horror movies that made their way into that basement, SLEEPAWAY CAMP was the one that never really left.
Years later, Tania went looking online for more info about the films and found SleepawayCampMovies.com. She got in touch with Jeff, which eventually led to the two of them working together to redesign and develop the site.
Since then, she’s helped preserve the history of the SLEEPAWAY CAMP franchise for fans old and new.