“Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare” explores the story of The Challenger Foundation, a two-month wilderness therapy camp that was supposed to course-correct at-risk teens. Back in the ’80s, the program took teens away from their parents, often by way of staged kidnappings, and dumped them in the wilderness to endure months of so-called discipline that was supposed to curb the troubled teens’ bad behavior. Overseen by former military special forces officer Steve Cartisano, The Challenger Foundation forced its “attendees,” if you can call them that, to hike hundreds of miles across the Utah desert and punish them in humiliating ways if they complained. Aside from suffering numerous indignities, one teenager tragically died while at the camp.
Unsurprisingly then, people are finding “Hell Camp” a little too much to take, with viewers warning others of the harrowing events recounted in Netflix’s new doc. The Daily Mail has rounded up a few quotes from X/Twitter users shocked by the whole affair, with one quoted as writing, “Highly recommend to everyone to NEVER watch ‘Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare.’ This is disgusting on too many levels.” Meanwhile UniLad quotes one social media poster as declaring “Hell Camp” to be “the most f****d up documentary I have ever watched.”
Elsewhere, the reactions continue to come in, with X/Twitter user @michellefowlers registering her disgust with the doc thusly: “Hell camp on Netflix is making me feel sick the amount of abuse those kids went through omg how was this allowed.” Further comments confirm others are similarly disgusted by the events in “Hell Camp,” with some warning others about the “sickening” documentary.