Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare review – so dark it’s an anti-Christmas watchalong
As everyone knows by now, Netflix has at its disposal such a monumental bank of user information that it effectively knows what we want to see before we even know it ourselves. This has never been more clear than during this long, flat featureless post-Christmas week, when Netflix knows that all we really want is to be bummed out beyond all comprehension.
You saw it in 2015, when the world coalesced around Making a Murderer after the glow of Christmas had burned off. And in 2019, when it gave us the deceptively grim documentary Don’t F**k With Cats. And in 2021, when we had Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer. And now it has chosen to fill the last dead week of this year with Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare, a documentary full to the brim with death, sexual assault and child abuse. Netflix, you shouldn’t have.
Hell Camp is a film about Steve Cartisano, the founder of the Challenger wilderness therapy programme, an organisation that existed to kidnap wayward teens from their beds (on their parents’ dime) and then force them to spend 63 days hiking through the boiling wilds of Utah until, shattered by the mental and physical torment of their experience, they hit upon something approximating a spiritual epiphany and never did anything bad again.
Which would be great if it worked but, as Hell Camp makes increasingly evident, it did not. Even though the scheme made Cartisano millions of dollars, the film is filled with kids (now, more often than not, highly traumatised adults) who graphically detail all the various ways their lives fell apart after Challenger. Fear. Suspicion. Broken relationships. Trust issues. And these are from the participants who could tell their story. Kristen Chase, a 16-year-old girl who died of heatstroke during a hike, wasn’t so lucky.
Chase’s death ended the Challenger programme. But although Cartisano was acquitted of negligent homicide and child abuse (“I am one happy dude,” he charmingly announced outside court after the verdict), he simply upped and moved his grift elsewhere.
First, he island-hopped across the Caribbean, chased by authorities, peddling his programme under a new name, HealthCare America. And then in Samoa, where he worked as a consultant under an assumed name, taking $2,500 a month from concerned parents to make their children endure what looked to all the world like a cross between a forced labour camp and Lord of the Flies, a place where attendees had to dig their own sewers.
All of which is to say that Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare isn’t exactly a fun watch. Indeed, as its gruesomeness builds, and with even Cartisano’s cheerleaders realising the depths of his behaviour, you might be left with the impression that this is too grim, even for Netflix’s anti-Christmas watch along slot.
What Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare does have, however, is the rare ability to move beyond the sense that someone has simply filmed a Wikipedia page. In its dying moments, right after the accusations against Cartisano have reached a point of stomach-churning awfulness, the documentary reminds us that wilderness therapy programmes are not a product of a bygone age. They still exist, in greater numbers than ever, forcing rebellious adolescents to endure all manner of brutal conditions in an attempt to get them back on the straight and narrow.
We’re shown clips of Paris Hilton, who spoke out about the abuse she suffered in a similar programme, and reminded that thousands of other children have endured similar experiences. But a Netflix true crime documentary isn’t a Netflix true crime documentary unless it implicates its audience as well. It’s unspoken, but the parallels between wilderness therapy and a lot of what now passes for entertainment are made perfectly obvious.
There’s a vanishingly fine line between what happened at Challenger and what we will gleefully consume through shows such as SAS: Who Dares Wins or I’m a Celebrity. You’ll watch Hell Camp, and rightly be appalled, but then hop off into a different submenu to watch a Squid Game reality show that was called inhumane by its own contestants.
Indeed, there will be some people who will accidentally click on this title because they thought it would be a semi-ironic reality show in the mould of last year’s Snowflake Mountain. I don’t know what that says about us as a species, but it cannot possibly be good.
• Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare is on Netflix