Crystal Lake (Brad Kane, 2026): Spoiler Free

Sean Cunningham had been producing soft core porn, commercials very low budget horror films. After one film he'd been trying to put together fell apart, the financing was still available, but he had no script and no film. In a discussion with then editor Wes Craven, Cunningham told him if he wrote a script for a horror film that would spoke to all of the conservative Christian fears Craven had been raised with, Craven could direct it. Craven wrote a script based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring that became Last House on the Left, and the controversy surrounding it helped turn it into a modest success (while nearly ending Craven's directing career), and among the canon of influential horror films from the 1970s.

In 1979, after seeing the runaway success of John Carpenter's Halloween, producer Sean Cunningham, decided he could create a low budget horror film using the same basic formula, and before Victor Miller had begun a script, took out a full page ad for Friday the 13th in Variety magazine, just to find out if he could attract investment in the idea. It did. The film, with a budget of no more than $650,000, spawned the iconic, cultural behemoth that is Jason Vorhees and a franchise spanning movies, games, television, merchandise of every conceivable variety, that's brought in over a billion dollars.

In what I call "the rule of two," Friday the 13th, even though Halloween's success was what exposed a mass audience to the basic formula, the success of Friday the 13th, with its addition of a whodunit style story framework, a more over the top approach to gore and elaborate on screen murders, a twisted revenge motive, and a photogenic young cast, made it the blueprint for the slasher sub genre. Producers, financiers and studios imitated the imitator, and the films imitating Friday the 13th dominated horror, in terms of the public's perception of the horror genre, and at the box office, through the eighties.

As was true of the majority of slasher franchises that began in the eighties, Friday became a victim of its own success and the rapacious appetite for profit churned out a slew of sequels, fast and cheap, without much interest in quality control. With quality control not being a priority, it meant a few interesting story ideas made it into the sequels, but they were never really taken advantage of, and what this produces is something more like a mythology than a solid understand of who Jason Voorhees or his psychotic, murderous mother from the first film were. There is essentially no point in even trying to suss out anything like a continuity. Even though there are a few attempts to squeeze an interesting premise out of the mythology set up by the first two films in the subsequent sequels, there's nothing remotely like coherence to any of it. Jason X which ends that original run of sequels, becomes a direct, conscious self parody, taking Jason to space, and turning him into a cyborg. Jason Vs Freddy came along to give all the fans of eighties slashers the ultimate fan service. There was even a television show at one point, Friday the 13th: The Series, that had nothing at all to do with Jason, Crystal Lake or Pamela, and instead took an X Files like structure of a team trying to recover cursed objects that had been sold from an antiquities and curio shop.

It would be the financial success of a remake in 2009 that sent the franchise into a legal hellscape that lasted fifteen years. Because the franchise rights had changed hands so many times, and because it was such an economic engine, questions about who owned what rights, who was due what percentage of the royalties, who created which characters and so on, prevented anything with the title Friday the 13th or using any of its characters from being made. At one point, there was a Friday the 13th video that developed a cult following and even became victim of the legal battles, having end production of any content and shut down its servers.

The legal wrangling came to an end a few years ago though, and that leaves a complicated, but possible way through to new movies, television and whatever else, using the various pieces associated with the franchise. If you read my piece on Mike Flanagan's Carrie adaptation , you'll know I don't take the concepts of "canon" or source material as having sanctity. There's something that seems too close to religious fundamentalism in how viciously fandoms have come to respond to new iterations and variations of beloved stories and characters, whose love for original stories or "properties" is the source of why they want to create new adaptations and iterations. Part of the way I perceive storytelling is that the act itself is the thing that has sanctity, and the different stories themselves are our way of expressing this. Specific stories may have particular individual value to me, they may even be in the realm of the sacred for me, but that doesn't mean they are mine. They belong to everyone who loves them, and if someone who loves a story I do or even if they hate a story I find sacred, I'm open to why they decide to retell a story, and what they're expressing through it.

The first to make it to screens since the rights made it out of that legal void is Crystal Lake. It is, ostensibly a prequel, detailing how Pamela Voorhees comes to be the murderous mother slashing her way through a summer camp in the original Friday the 13th. The combination of very little backstory and that the franchise has ever treated as anything as core "canon" has left how to tell that story open to nearly infinite possibilities. Casting Linda Cardellini in the iconic role was a good start, as she's a veteran with a wide range of roles, but without a role like Pamela Voorhees in her past.

The question is, "How is Crystal Lake?" or "Does this work as a season of television?"

Since the announcement, there's been question about how much relation Friday the 13th might have to Bates Motel, another series taking on one of the more iconic mother and son relationships on screen. The similarities are hard to miss, and both embrace pulp as the language of genre. Bates Motel wallowed in the misery, depravity, corruption, one of the regional accents of pulp language. Everyone has a shocking secret, and not just a shocking secret, but invariably one that steps over the line from the mundane in our real world and everyday lives, and into a sensationalistic corruption. It's small town is practically one of Dante's circles of hell in this regard. In it's way, Bates Motel was a celebration of these things in storytelling. It's part of the pulpy nature of the series, as well as what tips it over into having a very soap opera atmosphere and feel. When everything and almost everyone is so deeply corrupt and depraved, and the series begins with shocking depravity, there's nowhere for it go. At some point, there's no way to escalate, and there's nothing new, different or interesting about yet another character being exposed as hiding what should or would be a shocking level of corruption and/or depravity. It ends up presenting a leering, suspicious vision of humanity. What it sees is in human beings is not much more than emotionally and psychologically damaged, as twisted, bent, venal and self involved. The only struggle in life is whether one will be the victim or the predator. Every victim is destined to become a predator and every predator a victim, as long as one lives long enough. Like American Horror Story, it invites us to stare at the freaks, but it somehow manages to have less curiosity and less sense of it's own absurdity that gives AHS its camp, in the recognition we, the audience, are just as freakish in our staring.

Crystal Lake is also trafficking in pulp, but it's not wallowing in corruption as the essential nature of the human being. It has room for more mundane characters on its spectrum, and it understands the response to corruption can be its own kind of corruption. Some of its characters are decent people, with mundane shortcomings, quirks and oddities, who happen to be orbiting and crossing paths with a story involving something that truly monstrous, and what it means for them. It understands it needs to be able to escalate, and that the run of the mill asshole or weirdo are made of different stuff than real evil freaks running around in the world. It's more interrogative, in this way, even if it doesn't have anything particularly profound to say.

Linda Cardellini is the anchor for all of this, playing Pamela Voorhees, at the center of the story. Cardellini's very good, grabbing audiences and taking their hand through this pulpy story of motherly love, loss, retribution, self discovery, manipulation and into psychosis. It's a story of transformation. The transformation is extreme, because the circumstances are, but it's also a process, and that process could have been interrupted at any point if underestimating women wasn't the baseline of the fifties and seventies worlds we see her in. Some of it is writing smart enough to hold the pulpy tone, slide in some character development, and not nod and wink when it's saying something about the sexism contributes to Pamela's story. It's clear Cardellini respects Pamela Voorhees as a character, and the combination of the way she's written and the performance create a character who has a depth of intellect she's been required to hide so long, she may not even know its there. There's a wiliness to Pam. At no point does the writing suggest she's some kind of diabolical mastermind, but the structure of her story and the performance do give us a sense she's following a compass. She may not necessarily see it or know where it's pointing, but she is moving in a way that suggests she understands her situation far better than she's even letting herself realize. It creates the sense that this is someone whose very intelligent, but has never thought of themselves that way, because the world around her required she didn't. The life she had before becoming Jason's mother is no longer open to her, and the purpose in motherhood is taken from her at his death. Without access to either of those, vengeful sentinel becomes her purpose.

Crystal Lake also manages to pay homage to the rest of the Friday the 13th franchise at different points, without being slavishly dedicated to it. Most of them are purely visual or new versions of characters from the original, and when it does pull something bigger, it does so in a way that gives it depth or re-contextualizes it. What begins like seemingly bland fan service takes on a different, more significant meaning within this story as it unfolds. I would imagine, if you'd never seen the movies it's pulling from, these scenes would feel organic, and not like you're missing context that would be there if you'd seen the movies. .

Crystal Lake is a series that understands the appeal of the film franchise too. The Friday the 13th movies are ridiculous in a number of ways, which has always been part of their allure. Crystal Lake recognizes this, and reaches for it as an acknowledgment of some of the most ridiculous aspects of the franchise existence. I suspect it may have a little too much faith in the audience ability to realize that, and that will be reflected in the way the criticism is going to respond to the season's second half, but if taken as the acknowledgment I think it is, it's pretty entertaining. I have zero doubt episode seven is going to be the most significant stumbling block, because of the way it leans into the ridiculous nature of what it's trying to explain. It's where the series reaches for a different dialect in the language of pulp, and with the literal nature of today's audience, there's likely to be a large portion of it who find that jarring and don't recognize it as an appreciation for part of what made the movies ground zero for the slasher sub genre.

Maybe the most interesting thing about Crystal Lake is that it's not trying to be prestige television. It's trying to tell an entertaining, engaging story, and relying on Linda Cardellini to be the anchor that brings audiences back to each episode, but it's not reaching for the grandeur and begging to be taken seriously. It understands that there's a place in the media landscape for things that are well made pulp that are a combination of fun distraction and "OMG! That's gnarly" moments of shock, without wrapping them in more than the drives and reactions of the central character. It gets that we can care about a character, and be invested in their journey, and that's enough.

Ultimately, whether Crystal Lake will be a kind of footnote attached to the history of a franchise that helped define an era of horror movies or whether it will be the foundation for a new era in Friday the 13th, Pamela and Jason Voorhees, keeping them relevant in cultural consciousness for another generation, will depend on whether the series is renewed, and whether its storyline shapes whatever other stories is told using the mantle and characters.

All eight episodes are streaming on Peacock now, should you so choose to wade in.