Just when you thought it was safe to be a promiscuous camp counselor at a ramshackle summer camp … “Crystal Lake” is here.
The new “Friday the 13th” prequel series from A24 has arrived on Peacock, just in time for spooky season. It follows Linda Cardellini’s Pamela Voorhees, who is dealing with the drowning of her young son Jason at the summer camp where she works. But what starts as an exploration of a mother’s grief in the face of unimaginable tragedy soon spirals out into something much, much bigger…
TheWrap spoke with showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, who took over the series after Bryan Fuller and Jim Danger Gray had initially developed the project, about some of the bigger and more controversial aspects of the series.
Obviously huge spoilers below, do not read until you’ve finished the entire series. If not, you’ll likely be drowned in the chilly waters of Crystal Lake.
Pam doesn’t kill the counselors
This is something that is really shocking and odd — in a moment lifted directly from Sean S. Cunningham’s original “Friday the 13th,” we get a POV shot of someone killing the two counselors that were responsible for Jason’s drowning. This is what starts the original film and is, arguably, one of the more iconic images from that movie. All of this makes the reveal in “Crystal Lake” — that it wasn’t Pam who killed the counselors but rather a young girl named Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom) who has taken LSD with some local hippies. (Yes, these are actual plotlines.)
Grace, you see, was one of Jason’s few friends and who found out who was responsible for his drowning. When she took the LSD something flipped and she went from being a sweet little kid to part of the Manson Family. This, most likely, was a common fear at the time, when it came to hallucinogenic drugs.
When we asked Kane about it he shot back with another question, “I would ask you: Did you see Pam kill those counselors in the movie?”
Technically, no. It’s a POV shot so it could have been anyone. But it’s strongly implied, by the end of the first movie, that it was Pam Voorhees getting vengeance for her son.
In the original version of “Crystal Lake” by Fuller and Gray, the two counselors are actually killed off at the end of the pilot. Instead, Pam dispatches a couple of jack-booted thugs in the first episode of the series currently streaming. But more on that in a minute.
“We’re doing a TV show where you want to have twists and turns, where you want to recontextualize the things you think you know about the movie,” Gray explained. “Had Grace not been there, Pam would have killed those people. She was going in there to kill those people once she realized that they were the ones that neglected Jason. But we turned it on its head a little bit.”
Instead of the scene playing out exactly as you imagined it would (and exactly as it has in the previous movie), there are chances that you’d have been bored. Been there. Slashed that.
“That’s the fun of doing a television show. Why give people exactly what they think they know from the movies? You want to give them a little bit of a twist, a little bit of a turn, surprise them and recontextualize things that they thought they knew,” Gray explained
Plus, there is a little bit more to that scene. One of the counselors isn’t totally dead. And when she finds Grace and the two counselors, she “finishes one of them.”
“We see that twist where she could have saved one of the counselors. She could have bought it back, but she’s gone over the deep end too, and she ultimately you know you know uses their death to frame some people and help the person who actually did the stabbing,” said Gray.
Yes, they blame the hippies in the woods. Nothing beats a hippie scapegoat!
Jason is a genetic mutant meant to survive a nuclear apocalypse
Okay here’s the real doozy, the one that will have everybody talking — hardened “Friday the 13th” zealot and dewy-eyed newcomer alike.
The show’s penultimate episode, entitled “Friday…,” is a flashback episode, equal parts, as Kane said, “Douglas Sirk and David Cronenberg.” We follow the young couple — Pamela has yet to adopt the Voorhees last name, as they try to conceive. Pam’s husband (a charmingly sinister Hamish Linklater) works for a shadowy organization called Bell Flower and together, she goes through a series of procedures that eventually produce a child — Jason.
Jason is different, and we’re not just talking about how he looks. As Linklater describes in a presentation to the company, Jason is part of a secret project called Argonaut. (Get it? As in … “Jason and the Argonauts.”) They combined cockroach DNA — this is 100% the truth — with human DNA to create a new species that could withstand nuclear devastation. Among other things, this allowed Jason to survive potential drowning (!) and grow rapidly, which is why he’s about the size he is in “Friday the 13th: Part 2” by the end of the first season.
If this sounds slightly familiar, it’s probably because Kane also served as the showrunner for the first season of “It: Welcome to Derry,” which imagined the U.S. military wanting to harness the power of Pennywise to win the Cold War.
“If you’re setting a show in 1962 on a military base, you can’t escape the Cold War background and the realities of what was going on in that time,” Kane shot back about the weaponizing-Pennywise subplot. He said they’re working on Season 2 of “Derry” right now, which is set in 1935 (“Now you’re in the Depression and there are very different things going on in America”).
“There were certain things going on at the time in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s that were happening and I wanted to dive into those themes of mistrust of institutions, taking agency from women who really trusted their husbands and trusted corporations and institutions,” Kane explained about the “Crystal Lake” episode.
And indeed some of the best stuff from the episode involves Pam interacting with another pregnant young woman who is in the program, who uncovers the truth about Bell Flower and slits her own throat. It’s very “Stepford Wives” in a fun way.
“It just felt like that was ripe to start for a place of where Jason came from, and especially since things like this were actually happening. There are very famous stories of you know in the ’40s and ’50s that pregnant women were paid and given supplements that actually contained radioactive materials to see how their fetuses would react to that amount of radiation. These were real things that were going on,” said Kane. “Obviously, the Tuskegee Airmen were experimented on, were given syphilis without their knowledge and had to suffer the consequences of that. It fed into the theme that I wanted, which is how we entered the ’70s with, which was mistrust of institutions. We trusted America, we trusted our government, we trusted our corporations, and they betrayed us. And that was something that you know caused the identity crisis of this country in the 1970s, and it very much mirrors the identity crisis that Pam faces on the other side of losing Jason. I wanted those two thematics to line up.”
There’s no nudity
One of the “Friday the 13th” tropes that nearly every installment indulged in was a ton of nudity.
This isn’t always the case, of course. “Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives,” has no nudity, which probably has to do with its lighter tone and the fact that it followed “Friday the 13th: A New Beginning,” which has a staggering amount of sex and nudity and was directed by Danny Steinmann, whose first film was a full-on porno. Even 2009’s iffy “Friday the 13th” remake, released in the far more conservative 2000’s, had a fair amount of skin.
But aside from some chaste sex where you can see somebody’s tush, there is a decided lack of nudity. It is honestly a break from the norm that was a bit surprising – especially considering what you can get away with on a streaming show and considering the level of truly shocking violence in “Crystal Lake.”
“I tried. That’s America. You can give the kids the violence, but God forbid they see some breasts. Sometimes you get overruled in these things,” said Kane.
“Crystal Lake” is now streaming on Peacock.
