If the embed above misbehaves, the trailer is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-at1cOnkX0c
For a woman who appeared in precisely one film, and spent the sequels largely as a severed head (including one memorable turn in a fridge), Pamela Voorhees has done remarkably well for herself. Peacock dropped all eight episodes of Crystal Lake, its A24-produced prequel to Friday the 13th, in the US last Thursday. Here in Britain the whole season lands on Sky Atlantic and NOW today, Monday 19 October, which means a fair few SFcrowsnest readers are about to spend a wet autumn week at summer camp. Bring a torch. Possibly a priest.
Linda Cardellini, of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Mad Men and Dead to Me, takes over the part Betsy Palmer made famous in 1980: the camp cook in the chunky sweater whose grief curdles into a machete habit. Created by Brad Caleb Kane (It: Welcome to Derry), after Bryan Fuller’s earlier version of the project sank without trace in 2024, the series picks up roughly a year after young Jason (Callum Vinson) drowns in the lake, when two strangers turn up on Pam’s doorstep asking awkward questions about her past. Derry Girls director Michael Lennox handles the first three episodes, which is not a sentence anyone expected to read in 1980. Harry Manfredini, whose ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma did so much heavy lifting in the original, supplies music for the title sequence, and the late Victor Miller, who wrote the 1980 film, has an executive producer credit.
So, has anyone watched it yet? The American critics have, and the broad verdict is flawed, gory and worth it for the lead. TVLine gave it a B-minus, praising Cardellini to the rafters while grumbling about stretches where the show drags its feet through the leaf litter. TheWrap found it wobbly and overstuffed with townsfolk subplots, but singled out the prosthetics by Rich Krusell and Noah Rivers, which make the kills properly nasty. Practical gore is back in fashion, which is good news for anyone who still remembers Tom Savini’s handiwork on the original with a fond shudder.
The purists, meanwhile, have sharpened their pencils. Kane has moved Jason’s drowning from 1957 to the early 1970s, which tidies up the arithmetic (by the films’ reckoning, Jason would be turning 80 about now) but tramples over a date fans have known since the days of the VHS rental shop. Kane’s defence is simple and hard to argue with: the franchise’s canon has never been consistent, so why not play with it?
Spoiler warning: the next two paragraphs discuss the series’ big twists. Skip to the final paragraph if you’d rather go in fresh.
The real row is about Jason himself. Later episodes introduce his father, Elias (Hamish Linklater), who works for a shadowy corporation called Bellflower and turns out to have used his son in an experiment to see whether humans could survive a nuclear war, by giving the boy the resilience of a cockroach. Yes, Jason Voorhees is now, to all intents and purposes, a part-cockroach mutant. It explains why he keeps getting back up, but it does rather take the shine off the mystique. Gregor Samsa would sympathise. Another twist hands one of the original film’s best-known killings, the murder of the camp counsellors Barry and Claudette, to somebody other than Pam.
Kane has defended the cockroach business with some spirit, telling Dread Central he took “a much more grounded swing” than earlier instalments, which sent Jason to Hell, to space, and up against a Carrie lookalike. He has a point. A franchise that gave us Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X and the telekinetic Tina of The New Blood is in no position to complain about a bit of Cold War biology. Still, there is a difference between a sequel going barmy and a prequel rewriting why the monster works in the first place.
Whether Crystal Lake works for you will probably depend on how sacred you hold the lore of a series that once had its star take Manhattan mostly from the deck of a cruise ship. Cardellini, by every account, is the reason to turn up, and eight hours of grief, gore and 1970s knitwear is a reasonable way to see in Halloween. Just don’t go in the water. You know the rules.
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