There are movies that happen in the summer, and then there are summer movies.
You know the ones. The ones that immediately transport you back to a time when anything felt possible, love was brand new, and bug spray was basically our signature scent. They remind us of cold morning swims, hot evening campfires, first kisses, and the kind of summers that somehow seemed to last forever.
Whether or not you were a cottage or camp kid, these movies made us all want to be a camp and cottage kid. These aren’t just movies, they’re a whole summer culture.
Here are our favorite camp and cottage movies that immediately take us back to the woods.
Wet Hot American Summer
Despite being a satire, Wet Hot American Summer somehow still nails the feeling—and the awkwardness—of summer camp. Set on the last day of camp in 1981, it follows a group of “teens” (played by a cast of very recognizable actors who were all in their twenties and thirties at the time, which somehow makes the awkward teenage antics even funnier) as they experience love, heartbreak, talent shows…and aliens. You know, everything every summer camp needs.
Starring Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Michael Ian Black, David Hyde Pierce, Janeane Garofalo and what feels like half of Hollywood, Wet Hot American Summer takes every camp movie cliché and turns it up to 11.
Why it’s a summer classic: It’s the funniest love letter ever written to the awkward, ridiculous magic of summer camp. It’s over the top, completely bizarre, and so unapologetically Gen X.
Dirty Dancing
Set during the summer of 1963, Dirty Dancing follows Frances “Baby” Houseman as she spends the season with her family at Kellerman’s, a Catskills resort filled with lakefront activities, talent shows, and dance lessons—complete with a whole bunch of incredibly attractive dance instructors.
Baby, trying to embody the antithesis of her nickname, gets involved with the resort staff and falls in love with the very buff—and, in real life, very much too old to be playing the love interest of a 17-year-old—Patrick Swayze.
This problematic age gap isn’t the issue her dad has with the relationship, however. Johnny (the “24-year-old” dance instructor played by the thirty-something Patrick Swayze) not only implies that he’s responsible for the pregnancy that results in a back-alley abortion that nearly kills another dance instructor, but he’s also only a summer dance instructor—and that simply isn’t good enough for the doctor’s kid.
Eventually, Baby’s dad comes around when everyone watches Baby and Johnny perform at the end-of-summer showcase because one good lift obviously erases the age gap and the whole “just a dance instructor” issue. The summer ends with everyone happy and having learned a little bit about themselves.
Why it’s a summer classic: Despite everything we notice while watching it as adults, Dirty Dancing still captures the magic of a summer away from home—a place where the usual rules don’t seem to apply, first love feels like forever, and you can become an entirely different person before it’s time to pack up and leave. It gave generations of us nostalgia for a Catskills vacation we never actually experienced and unrealistic expectations about what might happen if we just carried a watermelon.
A Walk on the Moon
Set during the summer of 1969, A Walk on the Moon follows a Jewish family spending the season in the Catskills as they navigate life, marriage, and teenage rebellion (from both the daughter and the mom).
The film stars Diane Lane as Pearl, a mother who got pregnant and married so young that she never really had the chance to experience life as a teenager (but “who stopped you Pearl?”); Anna Paquin as Alison, Pearl’s actual teenage daughter; Liev Schreiber as Marty, the family patriarch who is trying his best while splitting his time between work in the city and his family in the Catskills; and Viggo Mortensen as the Blouse Man, who becomes exactly the distraction Pearl needs.
Of course, there is also a whole cast of memorable characters, including the amazing Tovah Feldshuh as Bubbie, Marty’s mother, who understands more than anyone what is at stake and is determined to prevent her son and daughter-in-law from repeating the choices that once left her raising a child alone.
Why it’s a summer classic: A Walk on the Moon offers a kind of inherited nostalgia. We may not have lived through the summer of 1969, but we grew up hearing our parents’ stories about it. Much like Dirty Dancing, it captures a time and place that our parents held on a pedestal while also embodying so much of the summer life we knew and loved.
Meatballs
Before Wet Hot American Summer took everything about summer camp and made it completely absurd, there was Meatballs. The 1979 Canadian comedy stars Bill Murray as Tripper, the head counsellor at the decidedly less-than-fancy Camp North Star, where the counsellors are more interested in hooking up and causing trouble than providing any sort of responsible supervision.
At the centre of the movie is Rudy, a lonely camper who doesn’t quite fit in and forms an unlikely friendship with Tripper. There are camp romances, pranks, competitions with the rich kids across the lake and enough questionable adult supervision to make you wonder how any of us survived childhood in the ’70s and ’80s.
Why it’s a summer classic: Meatballs is basically the blueprint for the summer camp movie. It’s messy, inappropriate, sweet and completely unserious, but underneath all the jokes is something surprisingly sincere about finding your people and realizing that maybe fitting in isn’t as important as you thought. Plus, as Tripper famously reminds everyone, it just doesn’t matter.
The Great Outdoors
If summer camp movies are about getting away from your parents, The Great Outdoors is about what happens when you’re an adult and realize that now you are the parent on the terrible family vacation.
The 1988 comedy stars John Candy as Chet Ripley, who takes his wife and kids to a Wisconsin lake resort hoping to recreate the idyllic summer vacations of his childhood. Things are going relatively well until his wealthy, obnoxious brother-in-law Roman, played by Dan Aykroyd, shows up uninvited with his family. What follows is basically every cottage vacation disaster imaginable: family arguments, water sports, teenagers falling in love, wildlife encounters and an enormous steak that should never have been ordered in the first place.
Why it’s a summer classic: The Great Outdoors understands that half the magic of cottage life is how spectacularly badly it can go. The weather won’t cooperate, the relatives will drive you insane, something will inevitably happen with a boat—and somehow you’ll still spend the entire winter wishing you were back at the lake.
Maybe we can’t go back to the summers of our childhood, when two months felt like forever and our biggest concern was whether we’d remembered the bug spray. But we can still revisit them for a couple of hours.
Whether your summer memories involve sleepaway camp, a family cottage, a Catskills resort, or simply wishing you’d been lucky enough to experience any of the above, these movies capture something that feels increasingly hard to find: the magic of a summer that seemed like it might never end.
So open the windows, pour yourself something cold, and head back to the lake. Just remember the bug spray.
Ready for another reminder that time has absolutely no respect for us? Check out the TV and movie characters we thought were ancient as kids—who somehow turned out to be our age.
