Where Did Angela Go? The Strange, Happy Haunt of Felissa Rose of 'Sleepaway Camp' (1983)

If you’re from the generation that remembers calling someone a “total Angela” and meaning it as the creepiest insult possible, thank Felissa Rose. When Robert Hiltzik’s low-budget summer-camp shocker Sleepaway Camp debuted in 1983, it didn’t just deliver a twist ending — it gave the movies one of their most disquieting young performers. Rose was a child actor, spoken about in interviews as being just twelve or thirteen at the time of shooting, and that adolescent stillness in the role — equal parts fragile and uncanny — is the movie’s long, cold aftertaste.

Cast by chance, remembered forever

Rose was plucked from the New York acting circuit as a young teen. In later interviews she recounts how surreal it was to be on the set with her mother present and to discover, on opening night, how violently audiences reacted to the film’s climax. That terror — the way Sleepaway Camp uses long, quiet closeups of Rose to hold the viewer — is what made the final reveal land like a gut-punch. Her early exit from mainstream child stardom wasn’t dramatic so much as ordinary: sporadic roles, normal life choices, and then — as cult reverence built — a return to low-budget and indie horror.

The 1990s detour you can’t unsee

If you’ve spent time down the YouTube rabbit hole of odd PSAs and educational videos, you might have stumbled on the jarringly upbeat — and frankly unforgettable — public-service segment sometimes titled Get With a Safe Food Attitude (a.k.a. “What Moms-to-Be Need to Know About Safe Food”). In it, Rose turns up not as Angela but as a pregnant mom to be in a brisk, oddly produced instructional piece that at one point leans into a rap-style delivery about food safety and nutrition.

The clip has been circulated by nostalgia and bad-movie channels for years; it even showed up in Red Letter Media’s Best of the Worst rotation (their “Wheel of the Worst” episodes often pull in odd training films and PSAs), which helped the clip re-enter the cult consciousness.

A slow-burn career in horrorland

After the Sleepaway Camp resurgence — spurred, in part, by the film’s midnight-movie afterlife and home-video trading — Rose leaned into the horror community rather than away from it. The 2000s and 2010s saw her appear regularly in indie slashers, anthology films and guest spots: Dante Tomaselli’s films, small-press horror anthologies, and later entries in the Sleepaway Camp canon (including cameos and voice/archival uses).

Rose became a scream-queen in the modern sense: a convention fixture, a podcast and commentary guest, and a dependable presence on low-budget genre productions. Wikipedia and a number of contemporary interviews catalog a long list of 2000s–2020s credits that show Rose actively choosing the horror world as her creative community rather than trying to cross into mainstream star lanes.

Why Angela still matters

The reason film fans keep circling back to Rose isn’t just nostalgia for the twist; it’s the uneasy mixture of childhood vulnerability and threat she embodies on screen. That tension made Sleepaway Camp feel different then and makes it feel different now — an artifact of 1980s slasher cinema that didn’t simply reproduce genre beats but used them to unsettle identity and spectatorship. Rose’s continuing work in horror — from cameos in Terrifier 2 and Victor Crowley-style entries to indie haunted-house pictures and occasional TV appearances — reinforces the idea that cult currency can be a full career, and a deliberately chosen one at that.

The human after the scream

Off camera, Rose’s life follows an uncomplicated, familiar arc for many actors who found early fame in one defining part: school, marriage, kids, then a return to the fest circuit. She’s active on social platforms, still appears at screenings and live commentaries for Sleepaway Camp, and in interviews she comes across as grateful for the film’s strange longevity and also bemused by the ways fans keep discovering new angles (like that PSA rap).

For our Movies of the 80s audience, that’s the good kind of career arc — not vanishing into anonymity, not blown up into tabloid celebrity, but quietly building a body of genre work while remaining linked to one indelible role.

Sources & where to watch the weird stuff

• Rose’s filmography, bio and recent credits — Wikipedia

• Several oral interviews where Rose discusses being 12/13 on Sleepaway Camp and her memories of opening night — Return To Sleepaway Camp interview and other press features on the Sleepaway Camp Special Edition DVD.

• The “Get With a Safe Food Attitude” (aka Moms-to-Be / 2-B Moms) PSA is catalogued on Letterboxd/TMDB and appears in lists and episode guides for Red Letter Media’s Best of the Worst Wheel episodes (it’s circulated in fan clips and was discussed on forums).