This article contains spoilers for the premiere episode of Crystal Lake, which arrives on Peacock on October 15.
Crystal Lake opens on Pamela Voorhees, hunched over a bathroom sink, blood all over her, looking into the mirror. A human tooth is lodged in one of her knuckles. “What did you do…?” she asks the woman looking back at her.
That is the first image Peacock’s Friday the 13th prequel series gives viewers, and it says a lot about the show’s priorities. Jason gets his moments, but the series belongs to Linda Cardellini, and Pam is the one with the knife.
The creator and cast were at New York Comic Con this week, a week before the premiere. They held a panel, ran a Camp Crystal Lake activation and screened the pilot, and we sat down with the group to talk about returning to Jason’s old stomping grounds. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane also explained why he thinks the canon has some flexibility.
“I mean, if you watch the [film] series, it changes things from movie to movie,” Caleb Kane said. “I think there’s always room and I think it’s always ripe for reinterpretation.”
Pamela takes center stage
In case your memory of Friday the 13th has faded, here’s a quick recap. Jason is the franchise’s signature slasher, but the killer in the original 1980 film was Pam, his mother. She came unhinged after her son drowned at Camp Crystal. (Or appeared to drown. Keep that in mind.)
Cardellini’s Pam isn’t insane, or at least not yet. By the time the first episode ends, though, there’s no question she’s capable of serious harm.
Cardellini recently won an Emmy for the HBO series DTF St. Louis. “There’s a switch,” she said. “If you flip it with her, there’s no going back. It’s almost like she doesn’t even understand what she’s doing. If someone flips that switch, there’s a loss of control for her. In a way, she’s looking for control and then she loses it at the same time. That’s the dangerous dance there.”
Caleb Kane was more direct. “I like to think there’s nobody more dangerous than a mother whose child is threatened,” he said.
Cardellini said part of the appeal is that nobody sees it coming. “Also, it’s somebody you don’t expect,” she said. What drew her in most, she said, was that “here’s this person who you can kind of relate to, but there’s a massive rage underneath there that, if you tap into it and start to open that Pandora PANDORA $95.63 ▲ +0.6%’s box, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle.”
Then the showrunner admitted something most people wouldn’t. “At a certain point, maybe it also feels a little good to let that genie happen,” Caleb Kane said.
Finally, a young Jason
Jason’s origin story is about as familiar as horror lore gets. Yet he has appeared in 12 movies (sort of: he’s dead for the fifth one) and decades of tie-in media, and we’ve seen almost nothing of his childhood. We know he had some kind of deformity. We know the grown-up Jason, who everyone thought had drowned, took over killing teenagers at Camp Crystal after his mother died in the first film. That’s about all.
Crystal Lake casts Callum Vinson, who you may recognize from the Chucky TV series, as a young Jason. He’s a sweet kid with a physical disability that includes a large, misshapen head.
Caleb Kane said this version of the character came from “Invention and being really well versed in the movies.” He cited the creature that make-up effects legend Tom Savini created for the end of the first film. It was monstrous, and it existed mainly as the idea that set Pam on her course.
“But if we’re doing a show about how Pam lost him, you want to see the connection between mother and child,” Caleb Kane said. “You want Jason to be a real 11-year-old boy, obviously with differences and difficulties. The iteration of Jason here really came out of the point where we were making a show about a relationship between mother and child. What is that? Who is Jason within the context of that relationship? How does losing him set Pam on this journey? So that’s where it came from.”
Cardellini described her son as “everything to Pam,” adding that “he’s everything to the franchise.” She has a point: leaving him out of this show would have felt odd.
“She just loves him more than anything,” Cardellini said. “Brad wrote this line that they’re connected at the heart, and I think that is really at the core of it all – that she never feels disconnected from him. I think the codependency and the inter-connectedness is very, very deep and almost, I don’t know, telepathic.”
The drowning is locked in. The death is less certain.
Every prequel has fixed events it has to hit, and the biggest one here is Jason’s drowning. Betsy Palmer’s Pam summed it up in the first film: “They were making love while that young boy drowned!” Crystal Lake’s first episode shows that moment, since Pam’s story can’t get going until it happens.
Still, Jason can’t really be dead, can he? That’s the challenge: how do you fill a whole season of television without contradicting a canon fans know by heart? According to Caleb Kane, you look for the spots where the canon gives a little.
“I think fans of the franchise are going to love certain movies and they don’t love certain movies and the fandom is pretty rabid,” he said. “As a longtime fan, as somebody who knows these movies, their novelizations, all of the things sort of chapter and verse, I felt like I had a little bit of license to play. Also, you’ve got to make sure that you give the fans what they want.”
He appears to be spending that license on Pam and Jason’s lives before Crystal Lake. The pilot hints at something called “Argonaut,” which appears in a flashback as a name on a door at the end of a long hallway. The show doesn’t explain it yet.
Caleb Kane did give a small hint. “What you learn about [Pam] later on in the series is that she did a lot to protect him and get him out of a pretty difficult situation, and herself,” he said. “When you put that amount of attention on protecting someone and loving someone, their absence is going to be that much more acute.”
And yes, it gets full Friday the 13th
As for the tooth in Pam’s knuckle, just wait until you find out how it ended up there.
The pilot has plenty of blood, some wildly excessive gore and a bit of sex. “The thing has to go full Friday the 13th at a certain point,” Caleb Kane said. “We made sure we did that in the show.”
At least in the first episode, none of it feels gratuitous. Those scenes move the story along and reveal who these characters are. One sequence comes close to pure gross-out, and it’s funny in the best way. I won’t spoil it. It’s better if you go in knowing nothing.
Pam’s supporting cast
A TV series needs more than a mother and son, and a few of the supporting characters stand out. William Catlett plays Sheriff Levon Brooks, Pam’s friend and a former city cop who seems a little out of his depth in the Crystal Lake woods. He may want more than friendship. Knowing where Pam’s story goes, that probably won’t end well for him.
Catlett said he plays the role without leaning on what’s ahead. “You know, I think you can have two things, two wishes at the same time within your mind,” he said. “You love Pam, you want to be with Pam, it’s a new beginning, but at the same time it’s like, who is this woman? And so if I don’t judge it, then I can allow myself to have those emotions that go through with it.”
Gwendolyn Sundstrom plays Grace, a girl in her early teens who is one of Jason’s few friends. His apparent death sends her down a path that could be dangerous for her.
“I think it’s losing the most important person in your life,” Sundstrom said. “Losing Jason, to Grace, is something that brings a lot of trauma, and I think that definitely plays into the rest of the season too. It’s something that Grace really struggles with, and she doesn’t want it to happen. She definitely wants it to reverse.”
One character has a free pass on dying
Several legacy characters from the first film appear as younger versions of themselves. “Crazy” Ralph, originally played by Walt Gorney, is now played by Nick Cordileone. Officer Dorf, played by Ron Millkie in the first film, is now played by Cameron Scoggins. Dorf survives the original movie, so Scoggins has something like plot armor.
“Yeah, he makes it!” Scoggins said with a laugh. “He doesn’t die as far as we know in the first movie. We’ll see. He appears so briefly in that first movie that you almost do have to go back and watch it sometimes, but it is a memorable little character, and you kind of wonder, where’s that guy coming from? And it’s just so fun to take such a brief scene and expand upon that and just take the energy of a different actor and be like, well, how are we going to build on this more?”
He’s wise to add “as far as we know.” Thirteen movies of history show that in this franchise, nobody stays safe for good.