The Burning

The Burning opens at Camp Blackfoot. A group of teenage campers, fed up with the cantankerous caretaker known as Cropsy, sneak into his cabin at night with a worm-filled skull rigged with candles, intending to scare him awake. The prank goes catastrophically wrong: Cropsy wakes, panics, knocks the skull over, and sets his bedding on fire. The flames catch his alcohol-soaked clothes; he runs out of the cabin engulfed and tumbles into the lake.

Five years later Cropsy is discharged from the hospital, his face and body grotesquely scarred. He picks up a prostitute in New York City and murders her almost immediately with scissors, then heads upstate to camp country carrying a pair of large garden shears.

At nearby Camp Stonewater the new summer session is underway. Senior counselor Todd quietly oversees a mixed group of teens, including the bullying alpha Glazer, the peeping outcast Alfred, sensitive Karen, and several others. Alfred is constantly terrorized by Glazer and his girlfriend Sally. Cropsy begins picking off the camp's perimeter — first a girl on the riverbank, then others — his presence treated by the counselors as rumor.

A group of five teens take a canoe trip and discover a missing camp raft drifting empty downriver. As one teen climbs aboard to retrieve it, Cropsy rises from beneath the water and butchers all five on the raft in seconds with his shears — heads, hands, and faces lopped off in the film's most notorious set piece. The empty raft drifts back to camp covered in blood.

With the camp in panic, Todd organizes an overland hike to safety. The expedition camps overnight in the woods, and Cropsy stalks them through the dark, killing Glazer and Sally during a tryst and picking off others. Alfred wanders off, witnesses Cropsy, and is captured.

Todd follows the trail to an abandoned copper mine. Inside he finds Alfred bound and alive. As they fight Cropsy in the dark, Todd recognizes him and admits aloud that he was one of the campers behind the prank years earlier. With Alfred's help he attacks Cropsy with an axe and incinerates him with a flare, igniting him a second and final time.