Friday the 13th fans already have an idea of what Jason Voorhees looked like as a kid. You see him lurching out of the water at the end of the first movie—and Corey Feldman’s character approximates his misshapen baldness at the climax of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Of course, nobody really knows what his face looks like, since at a certain point it just started blending into his signature hockey mask. That’ll change in Crystal Lake, the prequel series arriving on Peacock next week.
However, don’t expect the streamer to drop any crystal-clear looks at Callum Vinson (Chucky, the upcoming God of War) in full make-up ahead of time. A tiny trailer glimpse aside, that will be part of the surprise when the show premieres. We do know Vinson will wear prosthetics to play young Jason, but when we first meet the character at the start of Crystal Lake—before his tragic drowning, a crucial part of Friday lore—he’s not yet feeling any murderous impulses.
“He’s just a normal boy and he just wants to fit in with everybody, but since he had this deformation in his head, he got bullied a lot,” Vinson, who is 12, told Entertainment Weekly. “When I read these scripts, I was honestly really sad. I put myself in the body of Jason to become him. And it was hard, but I really enjoyed playing this character.”
The initial four-and-a-half-hour make-up process was whittled down to 90 minutes, but it sounds like Vinson was a good sport about it. “It’s a lot, but it makes you feel so cool,” he said. “It’s like you’re putting on Iron Man’s mask; you’re putting on Spider-Man’s mask.”
Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane said “pounds and pounds” of transformative makeup went into bringing Jason to life; while he praised the work of Tom Savini, the effects master who worked on 1980’s Friday the 13th, he said Crystal Lake tried to aim for something slightly less monstrous for its version.
“Savini killed it. [He] reached right into our brains and pulled out our worst nightmares of what a deformed child might look like,” Kane told EW. “But we’re trying to do something a little bit more grounded and a little bit up-to-date.”
According to Kane, there will in fact be a mask in the show—just not a hockey mask. However, “it will not be a different mask than fans have seen.”
Crystal Lake premieres October 15 on Peacock.
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