Although the Voorhees family is returning to the screen, don’t expect Crystal Lake to feature a machete-wielding bloodbath.
The Friday the 13th prequel series’ showrunner Brad Caleb Kane explained that the Peacock show is not “quite a slasher” but more of a “psychological thriller” that follows Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) before her son Jason’s death at the titular summer camp.
“It’s a paranoid ’70s thriller. It has all of the DNA of a slasher without quite being a slasher,” he explained to Entertainment Weekly. “There are rivers of blood in the show. There are very, I think, ingenious kill sequences and deaths and murders, but it’s all done in service of character and theme and place and time.”
Since the original Friday the 13th was released in 1980, Kane is not only exploring genres central to the ’70s, but also the social themes of the era.
Kane added, “I tried to think about Crystal Lake and a Friday the 13th prequel as, ‘What era did the first movie come out of?’ It came out of the paranoid ’70s thriller era. It came out of the mistrust-of-institutions era. It came out of the women’s lib era, the National Organization for Women era, this consciousness-raising awakening era in America. I wanted to go and play with all of those themes.”
With 12 movies in the franchise, spanning to 2009, the first Friday the 13th revealed Pamela as the killer picking off camp counselors after her son Jason drowned at the same camp when his own counselors were neglecting him. The rest of the films (with the exception of 1985’s Friday the 13th: A New Beginning) have Jason return from his watery grave to don his signature hockey mask and start swinging his machete.
In March, Cardellini was cast in Crystal Lake, following original showrunner Bryan Fuller‘s exit from the series last year. Kane took over the series in August 2024.
