This post contains spoilers for the Crystal Lake series premiere
Just when Jason Voorhees thought it was safe to go back in the water, the Crystal Lake series premiere drowns the poor kid all over again. Peacock‘s Friday the 13th prequel series — which dropped all eight episodes today as a pre-Halloween trick and treat — wastes little time replaying a seminal moment from the death-defying horror franchise, the one that launched a killing spree that’s endured across 46 years, 12 movies, a couple of video games and comic books, and now two TV shows.
Roughly six minutes into the Crystal Lake premiere, young Jason (Callum Vinson) is glimpsed splashing around in the waters of the titular body of water, situated right by the eponymous New Jersey summer camp, while his mother Pamela (recent Emmy winner Linda Cardellini) happily watches from the shore. Five minutes later, though, her smile turns into a scream when her neglected son swims out too far and sinks into Crystal Lake’s depths never to be seen again… or so we think anyway.
Jason’s drowning happens much deeper into the inaugural Friday the 13th feature that terrified moviegoers upon its release in 1980. And thanks to the no-frills aesthetics of that no-budget slasher movie, it’s presented as a brief flashback filmed almost entirely in close-up as an older Pamela (played by Betsy Palmer) remembers her son’s watery fate. But Crystal Lake showrunner Brad Caleb Kane seized on the opportunity afforded by the bigger scale and budget afforded by the NBCUniversal and A24 collab to make that sequence really take the audience’s breath away.
“The idea is that we were presenting it from the camp’s point of view,” Kane tells Gold Derby about how he and the episode’s director, Michael Lennox, reimagined the scene, which makes effective use of long shots and cuts to the shocked reactions happening on shore. “It feels like he’s far enough out there, so if he had trouble swimming and couldn’t get back to shore, he would go under before anybody could reach him.
“You really do feel Pam’s panic as she is running to try and get him,” Kane adds. “And we never wanted to go underwater with him; we wanted his drowning to feel mysterious to really play into the mystery that lingers when we pick up again nine months later. It’s all in service of making the emotion and character relationships as strong as possible so you feel that loss when Jason is wrenched away from Pam.”
It’s worth noting that we get to spend more time with Jason as the premiere — and the rest of the series — unfolds via extended flashbacks that reveal the full extent of the intense bond that he and Pamela share. That sets the stage for her transformation into the franchise’s original killer prior to her son picking up his signature machete and hockey mask. It’s the most screen time we’ve ever spent with Jason where he’s not in silent killer mode, which afforded Kane a unique opportunity to reveal the full depths of his personality.
“For me, Jason really had to be a normal 11-year-old boy, except for the physical challenges that he has,” Kane says of how he envisioned the Friday boogeyman’s childhood self, who canonically suffered from hydrocephalus — a condition that results in facial deformities. “He just wants to fit in, but kids in the ’70s were cruel. They were cruel in the ’80s, too, and probably still cruel today! It’s just inherent to that age group; anybody who is different gets pushed outside the group.
“Pam is so desperate for him to live as normal a life as possible that she pushes him into situations that maybe he shouldn’t be experiencing,” Kane adds. “I wanted that dynamic to be as acute as possible so you can see why she would go off her head after losing the one thing she was ostensibly living for.”
The cruelty of Jason’s fellow campers is definitely something that was more familiar to genre fans who grew up with the evil kids who defined so many of the horror favorites of yesteryear — think films like The Bad Seed or The Good Son. “There were fewer mechanisms in place then to make sure that kids behaved themselves and treated each other with a little bit more kindness,” Kane — who has two children of his own — muses about that particular trope. “There’s obviously since been a kindness movement in this country that’s pushed kids further in the direction of being responsible to others who are different from them.
“Even today, you might find kids who might act like jerks,” the showrunner continues. “But kids were much crueler back then, even if you didn’t have physical differences. They’d seize on the one thing that was your weakness and use that to dig into you. That attitude was definitely magnified at that point in America.”
Jason directly addresses the cruelty he experiences when he asks his mother at one point during the premiere, “Mommy, why am I like this?” And that question ends up informing the future killer’s arc throughout the series as we eventually come to learn exactly why he’s like this. “We, as parents, want to make everything OK for our kids,” Kane says about that pivotal moment. “And the reality is that we can’t. Our kids go out into the world and have their own experiences where we can’t watch them all the time. I really wanted that line to hammer home the idea that Pam loves Jason unconditionally, and wants to make everything okay — but in the end she can’t.
“We know what comes to pass,” Kane continues, referring to Jason’s drowning. “Something happens to him, and she’s not able to stop it. So that sense of wanting to make things okay instead becomes this sense of ‘I failed my son.'”
When it comes to taking bloody vengeance, though, you’d better believe that Pamela Voorhees isn’t gonna fail.
