Summer camp movies usually give you crushes, canoe tips, and maybe a mildly haunted lake. She Came from the Woodslooks at that tradition and says, “Cool. What if the counselors summoned a murderous ghost nurse on their last day and everything went to hell before breakfast?”
Directed by Erik Bloomquist and based on his 2017 short of the same name, this 2022 horror film plays like a love letter to 80s slashers, campfire legends, and dysfunctional families, with a generous drizzle of blood and sarcasm. It’s not perfect, but it is lively, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt underneath all the tongue-removal and child-possession.
Welcome to Camp Briarbrook, Please Don’t Bleed on the Ritual
We open at Camp Briarbrook during the end-of-season party, that liminal time when everyone’s tired, horny, emotional, and making choices their future therapists will bill extra for. Peter McAlister, grandson of camp owner Gilbert and chaotic energy incarnate, convinces the counselors to perform a blood ritual to summon local legend Nurse Agatha.
According to camp lore, Agatha was a nurse who used the kids as her own personal occult lab rats forty years earlier, until she was stopped. Which, given what happens next, clearly meant “briefly inconvenienced.”
Peter’s ritual, shockingly, actually works. This should be a lesson to horror characters everywhere: if the urban legend says “don’t do the ritual,” maybe don’t grab a knife and a chant and treat it like group bonding.
When the Kids Come Back Wrong
Once summoned, Agatha wastes no time. She possesses counselor Danny and a van full of kids that Peter’s brother Shawn was driving home. It takes about two minutes for the situation to go from “spooky prank” to “Danny bludgeons Kellie to death in front of everyone,” at which point Mike kills Danny in self-defense, and the counselors realize this night is not going to end with cleaning duty and hangovers.
The kids, now under Agatha’s influence, return to camp and literally resurrect her. Look, it was already hard enough corralling campers after lights-out. Add “vessel for vengeful spirit” and it’s absolutely not in the staff handbook.
The film gets a lot of mileage out of the possessed children angle. There’s something inherently unnerving about kids calmly doing unspeakable things, and She Came from the Woods leans into that: they swarm, they devour, they hand-deliver offerings to Agatha. It turns “cute campers” into a roving murder choir.
The McAlisters: A Family That Sacrifices Together
At the heart of the film is the McAlister family, who clearly should never be in charge of children, property, or reality.
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Gilbert (William Sadler) is the crusty, guilt-soaked patriarch who built the camp and buried some very literal problems in the woods.
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Heather (Cara Buono), his daughter, runs the place and also happens to be the mother of Peter and Shawn, juggling mom-mode with “trying to keep everyone alive” mode.
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Peter (Spencer List) is the impulsive grandson who kicks off the night’s carnage by treating dark magic like a party game.
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Shawn is the older, more bitter brother who you just know has “resentful eldest child energy” stored up like static.
When Peter’s disaster ritual succeeds, the film shifts gears into a messy, very entertaining family horror story. Summoning a vengeful spirit is bad enough. Realizing that spirit has an intimate, sleazy history with your grandfather? That’s therapy for three generations.
Nurse Agatha: Ghost, Abuser, Ring Enthusiast
Once the truth comes out, Agatha stops being just “spooky legend” and becomes the festering heart of the McAlister family curse.
Back in the day, she arrived at camp claiming she could heal Gilbert’s wife Evelyn, who was chronically ill. Instead, she slowly poisoned Evelyn while emotionally and sexually fixating on Gilbert. In a moment of emotional weakness and terrible judgment, he slept with Agatha only hours before Evelyn died. That alone would make for a bleak drama.
But Agatha didn’t stop at husband-stealing, wife-poisoning, and ring-wearing. She started experimenting on Heather and the campers, basically turning Briarbrook into a trial run for Hell’s pediatric ward. When Gilbert realized the extent of her abuse—and saw her wearing Evelyn’s wedding ring—he killed her and buried her in the deep forest.
So now, resurrected, Agatha wants that ring back. It’s an almost petty motive for such a powerful spirit, and that’s part of the fun: she’s not just some abstract cosmic evil. She’s vindictive, jealous, and obsessed, like a ghostly ex who also happens to control an army of murder kids.
Counselors in Chaos
One of the movie’s strengths is how it juggles a decent-sized ensemble without losing track of its tone. Mike, Veronica, Dylan, Ben, Ashley—each counselor gets just enough definition to make their deaths sting or their choices memorable.
We get:
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Veronica, who ends up bound to a bed with her tongue cut out (shout out to Agatha’s zero-tolerance policy for backtalk).
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Ashley, devoured by possessed children in what may be the worst possible way to get written up in a camp incident report.
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Mike, who volunteers to lure the kids into the basement and promptly gets kicked back into them by Dylan, earning himself a horribly unfair “heroic sacrifice gone wrong” moment.
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Dylan, who is so cartoonishly awful he might as well have “kills people for fun” on his staff application.
The carnage is bloody but not joylessly grim. The film’s sense of humor is on the darker side—think “we’re all dying but also, wow, what a stupid way to go”—which keeps it from feeling like a miserable slog.
Lore, Rings, and Really Bad Plans
Embracing their last-resort energy, the survivors come up with a plan to use Gilbert and Evelyn’s ring as bait to lure Agatha out. Because if there’s one thing horror characters cannot resist, it’s a high-risk scheme built around lying to a supernatural entity who has already demonstrated she does not take pranks well.
Predictably, when Agatha realizes the ring is fake, she kills Gilbert. Honestly, he had that one coming from several directions: murder, adultery, child endangerment, and general generational curse mismanagement. William Sadler sells the character’s guilt and desperation so well that his death feels both fitting and unexpectedly sad—like watching a captain go down with a ship he personally set on fire.
Dylan, meanwhile, drags poor Ben outside, tortures him, and leaves him as an “offering” to Agatha, cementing his status as the most punchable person at camp, living or dead.
Final Girl Energy and the One That Got Away
Our primary emotional anchor is Lauren (Clare Foley), who starts off as one of the more grounded counselors and gradually assumes classic Final Girl duties: react, survive, adapt, and watch everything you know burn.
By the time the survivors dismember Agatha and dump her in the lake, you can feel the film reaching for that cathartic “we did it” moment. It’s messy, rough, and gloriously low-tech: when in doubt, chop the ghost and deep-six the parts. It’s very “camp problem, camp solution.”
Then morning comes. An officer shows up. Ben survives long enough to be useful. For one brief, shining second, it almost feels like someone in a horror movie is going to walk away with something resembling closure.
And then Lauren hears Agatha laughing.
We don’t need to see her. The sound is enough. The implication is clear: you cannot chainsaw your way out of generational guilt, child abuse, and murder cult vibes that easily. Like any good campfire story, this one refuses to end tidy.
Final Verdict: Four Severed Ring Fingers Out of Five
She Came from the Woods isn’t trying to reinvent horror; it’s having too much fun reveling in it. It mixes:
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80s summer-camp nostalgia
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A creepy, personal villain
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A genuinely messed-up family backstory
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Possessed kids
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Dark comedy and splattery kills
Is it a little rough around the edges? Sure. Some beats are predictable, a few characters feel more like walking targets than people, and the lore occasionally leans into “just go with it” territory. But the movie’s enthusiasm, pacing, and commitment to its tone are infectious.
If you like your horror with campfires, cursed nurses, family secrets, and the distinct sense that HR should have shut this place down in 1979, She Came from the Woods is a wickedly fun watch. Just… maybe skip the blood rituals at your next staff party.
