Just when we’d started loudly whining about the lack of Crystal Lake updates, Peacock came through. Today, Friday the 13th fans got a first teaser for the prequel show, as well as more images and some insights from star Linda Cardellini and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, the latter courtesy of Entertainment Weekly.
The teaser explains that eerie events around Camp Crystal Lake started happening “after that kid drowned last summer,” delivering the facts via campfire tale, as Friday the 13th characters love to do.
As the EW profile notes, “Crystal Lake begins with the circumstances around that drowning and follows from there Pam’s descent into madness.” And there will be flashbacks: “Callum Vinson, dressed in pronounced makeup and prosthetics, plays a young Jason Voorhees with an enlarged head from hydrocephalus.”
In this first footage, we get plenty of Cardellini’s freaked-out Pamela, and the mood of terror mixed with happy campers feels spot-on.
Slasher faithful know Jason drowned in 1957, according to the 1980 film, but if you’re thinking Crystal Lake does not feel like 1958, you’d be correct. It’s set instead in the 1970s, which Kane wanted to do so he could “touch on all the pop-culture artifacts that were tangential to the America from which these movies were born.”
Cardellini teased that “the tone is odd. It is many things at once, but it works as this fun ride.”
While obviously horror in general and Friday the 13th lore specifically will be important, it sounds like exploring Pamela’s world will be the main thrust of the show.
“We wanted to dive into Pam’s psychology,” Kane said. “We wanted to see her unraveling after [watching] the events of the movie that everybody knows. We wanted to see her relationship with Jason and what his death kicks off in her—her trying to find some sort of equilibrium in her life after the thing that ostensibly she lives for, her son, was taken away from her and how all the people around her and the circumstances surrounding her make that impossible to do.”
Crystal Lake runs for eight episodes and hits Peacock on October 15.
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