Movies
[R.I.P.] ‘Sleepaway Camp’ Actress Desiree Gould Has Passed Away
There are many things about 1983 slasher Sleepaway Camp that allowed it to stand apart from the pack at the time as well as endure to this day, and one of them is the early appearance from Angela’s Aunt Martha before she heads off to camp. Aunt Martha was memorably played by actress Desiree Gould in the film, who has sadly passed away this week.
A few years prior to Sleepaway Camp, Gould had appeared in 1979 TV movie You Can’t Go Home Again, with her road to the screen being paved by ballet and musical theater. Gould left acting behind in the wake of Sleepaway Camp, but she returned in 2006 for the film Under Surveillance and later appeared in Caesar and Otto Meet Dracula’s Lawyer and Tales of Poe.
Outside of acting, Desiree Gould had been a real estate agent since the 1990s.
Sleepaway Camp co-star Felissa Rose paid tribute to Gould on Twitter this week, writing: “My heart is heavy. Today we lost a Sleepaway Camp family member. We all love you Desiree Gould. Thank you for creating such a charismatic and memorable character! Aunt Martha will be forever remembered. Condolences to all your family and friends. Rest easy.”
Desiree Gould was 76 years old. She may leave behind only a couple of performances in the horror genre, but Sleepaway Camp alone made her a horror icon we will truly never forget.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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