Given that the Friday the 13th franchise had been bogged down in lawsuits and development hell for several years by the time it was announced, it was no surprise that the road to the Crystal Lake series becoming a reality was complicated. Bryan Fuller and Jim Danger Gray were originally set to steer the project before A24 decided to go in a completely different direction. Fuller’s version was reportedly going to be a Hannibal-style reinvention of the franchise, with each season deconstructing one of the first four Friday the 13th movies. Brad Caleb Kane ultimately became the showrunner, and the series moved from Canada, where Fuller’s version would have been filmed, to New Jersey, where the original Friday the 13th was shot. And now Crystal Lake has finally made its way into the world.
Was it worth the wait? Absolutely.
That doesn’t mean Crystal Lake is perfect. Far from it, actually. There are some decisions made in this first season that fans will strongly disagree with, some mythology changes that may make them nervous, at least one major piece of Jason Voorhees history that never should have been delved into in the first place, and a couple of episodes that are less interesting than the rest. But overall, it’s a highly enjoyable show.
The most important thing Crystal Lake gets right is Pamela Voorhees. Linda Cardellini takes on a role originally played by Betsy Palmer 46 years ago, and she gives us a Pamela who feels like a fully realized human being rather than a future slasher villain waiting for her transformation. The original Friday the 13th gives us only fragments of Pamela’s life. We know she lost her son Jason when he drowned at Camp Crystal Lake, that she blames the counselors and eventually the people who want to reopen the camp, and that she’s completely unraveled by the time the movie takes place. Crystal Lake has the opportunity to spend an entire season with the woman behind the madness, and Cardellini does an amazing job. The show’s Pamela is grieving, lonely, protective, affectionate, frightening, and increasingly unstable. Watching her move through the season is one of the most compelling reasons to keep watching.
The show understands that the tragedy of Pamela Voorhees is not just that she becomes a murderer, but that she’s a mother who loses the person she loves most and gradually loses herself as well because of it.
The relationship between Pamela and Jason is therefore at the heart of the series, and the show spends a time establishing that relationship. Some of that material is heartbreaking. The early scenes involving Pamela and young Jason are among the strongest parts of the entire season. The writing gives Jason an innocence that makes the tragedy of his drowning hit harder, while Cardellini sells Pamela’s grief so effectively that some of her scenes genuinely hurt to watch.
It’s also incredibly interesting that the show takes the risk of presenting Jason as a child who can actually talk and interact with people normally. That won’t work for every fan. Some might prefer the more mysterious, silent version of Jason that exists in some of the franchise’s expanded material. That’s totally understandable. But this Jason is very likable. He’s a kid who dreams of being an outdoorsman. He has a friend, and he loves his mother. All of that makes the eventual mythology surrounding him all the more disturbing. I love that Pamela describes her connection with Jason as the two of them being joined at the heart. That’s the emotional foundation of the original Friday the 13th.
One of the show’s decisions later in the season bothered me more than almost anything else: the decision to create friction between Jason and his mother. There’s a moment when Jason turns against Pamela, and I don’t really understand why he’s so angry with her or how he becomes so feral. I’m not against Jason being strange, or even against the show adding new information to his history, but I don’t like seeing Jason and Pamela’s bond weakened. There’s something powerful about the idea that these two are permanently connected, and I would rather Crystal Lake lean into that than separate them.
Now, that said, if you have a deep affection for the original Friday the 13th, there’s a good chance you’ll get more out of Crystal Lake than someone who only knows Jason as the guy in the hockey mask. I absolutely love the sequels. I love Jason as a slasher icon, but I also think the original Friday the 13th is underrated and too often gets overshadowed by what came after. That first movie is one of the greatest horror movies ever made and definitely one of the creepiest slashers of all time. Crystal Lake understands that movie. There are times when the show feels like an extended love letter to it.
The production not only returns to New Jersey, it even uses Blairstown as downtown Crystal Lake, allowing locations from the original movie to appear in a new story. Hartung’s Diner is back. Familiar characters return. Dwarf, Ralph, and Enos are back. So are Barry and Claudette. And then there are the recreations. Sure, just recognizing something from an older movie isn’t enough to make a new story worthwhile, but Crystal Lake repeatedly finds ways to recreate familiar moments while giving them new context. Some of those moments will make fans very happy, and others will leave their heads spinning. One sequence in particular recreates a piece of the original movie so closely that it feels like you’ve suddenly fallen through a portal and landed in 1980.
The use of the original locations makes those moments even more effective because this isn’t somebody recreating Friday the 13th on a soundstage. This is the same town in New Jersey where the original movie was made.
Harry Manfredini’s iconic music also returns for the title sequence, and hearing that familiar sound attached to a new Friday the 13th project after all these years is wonderful. The show is constantly reminding longtime fans that it knows where it came from, and I loved it. That overwhelming affection extends to the smaller details, too. There are familiar costumes and props, recognizable locations, callbacks to lines and characters, and little pieces of franchise history scattered throughout the season. Sometimes Crystal Lake is practically waving at the audience. (Check out this list of Easter eggs.)
For a longtime fan, that’s part of the fun.
With all that being said, Crystal Lake isn’t trying to stretch the story of Pamela Voorhees into an eight-hour remake of Friday the 13th, either. Brad Caleb Kane has described the show as something of a mixtape of genres, and that’s pretty accurate. There is horror here, obviously. There’s also coming-of-age drama, conspiracy thriller material, small-town drama, dark comedy, romance, and some strange science fiction mythology thrown in as well. That variety, though, can be both a strength and a weakness. When it works, it makes Crystal Lake feel much bigger than a straightforward prequel. The town becomes a place populated by people who have their own lives, their own problems, and their own stories, even when Jason isn’t lurking around somewhere nearby.
I really liked the supporting characters. William Catlett’s Chief of Police, Levon Brooks, is an important part of the show, giving us a sympathetic lawman whose relationship with Pamela becomes quite complicated. Devon Kessler’s Briana Brooks, the chief’s sister, adds another dimension to the story as a journalist getting pulled into a mystery that’s much bigger than the stories she normally covers.
Gwendolyn Sundstrom makes Jason’s only friend, Grace, an important emotional part of the season as well. Her coming-of-age story takes the episodes in some surprising directions, and the relationship between Grace and Pamela adds another layer of emotional complexity.
Cameron Scoggins’ Officer Dorf is a very entertaining character to watch. He’s usually ridiculous and verging on pathetic, but there’s a sadness underneath his attempts to prove himself, and Scoggins gets a lot of mileage out of that. He’s a fun guy, especially when he’s being an idiot, and there’s a sweetness to his interactions with Joy Soprano as his crush, Rita.
Nick Cordileone also does an awesome job as Ralph. The original Ralph was unforgettable, but Cordileone was able to capture the strange energy Walt Gorney brought to the character without just doing a weird impersonation. When he delivers familiar Ralph material, it can be downright delightful.
Hamish Linklater brings something unexpected to the material when he enters the story, although I think his character will be among the more divisive elements of the series.
There are a lot of characters in Crystal Lake, and not every single storyline works equally well. But I liked spending time with these people. That’s important because the show is trying to build this community around Camp Crystal Lake.
And yes, Crystal Lake does give us plenty of the things we expect from Friday the 13th, too. There are bloody kills. There are people wandering around the woods who really shouldn’t be there. There are teenagers, counselors, drugs, sex, campfires, bad decisions, and a mysterious figure lurking somewhere in the darkness.
There’s even an open Camp Crystal Lake. The movies have spent a lot of time establishing the camp as a place associated with death, but we haven’t gotten to spend time with it functioning as an actual summer camp in a very long time. Seeing it filled with campers and counselors again is one of those simple pleasures that Crystal Lake understands.
Some of the mythology changes work better than others as well. The original movies establish that Jason drowned in 1957. Crystal Lake moves that event to the early 1970s. That’s something I would normally be against, but here I can accept the change because it isn’t completely arbitrary. Kane wanted the series to exist in the cultural landscape of the ’70s, allowing it to incorporate elements of that era into the story. That’s a legitimate creative choice.
The bigger problem for me is how far the show goes in expanding Jason’s history. I won’t get into all the specifics here, but Crystal Lake gives us information about Jason’s childhood and origins that goes far beyond anything mentioned in the original movies. And I have very mixed feelings about that. This is part of Jason’s origin that I didn’t need to know. I never wondered about it. I never wanted an explanation for it. And I don’t think the mystery surrounding Jason needs to be filled in with the kind of mythology that the show introduces.
At least the series doesn’t completely reduce Jason to a scientific explanation. We don’t know what makes him uniquely resilient. The show leaves room for Jason to be Jason rather than just suggesting that everything strange about him can be explained by a laboratory. So, he’s still Pamela’s special boy, but I don’t think this needed to be a part of Friday the 13th.
This is where, in my opinion, Crystal Lake occasionally runs into a problem. The franchise spent many years building up Jason Voorhees as an almost unknowable figure. There have been theories about him, supernatural explanations, contradictory pieces of continuity, and all sorts of fan speculation. Some of the fun comes from not knowing exactly what makes Jason tick. Crystal Lake decides to make some odd additions to the canon, and I’m not convinced that was necessary.
There are also moments when viewers may wonder why the show is spending quite so much time on a particular subplot. The second episode is a good example. A large portion of it revolves around a self-help seminar, and while I understand what Kane was doing with the material and how it fits into his desire to explore the culture of the early ’70s, it doesn’t seem like something that will connect with the fans. It felt like filler.
The same problem becomes even more noticeable later in the season when the series spends an entire episode digging into Jason’s past. The material isn’t necessarily badly made. The problem is that Crystal Lake has already set up a fascinating present day story. The flashback episode feels like the show has hit the brakes to explain things that didn’t need to be explained. Friday the 13th has never really needed that much explaining.
This is also where the show’s pacing becomes kind of uneven. Some of the detours are longer than they need to be, while some of the developments toward the end happen much faster than they should.
The first three episodes are directed by Michael Lennox, and he does a great job establishing the tone and style. I would actually say that the entire first 34 minutes of the premiere episode manages to achieve a state of absolute perfection. It’s closer to the old school Friday the 13th vibes than anything we’ve gotten in decades. We have Jason and Pamela at Camp Crystal Lake. The place looks great. Local oddball Ralph is hanging around the woods. There’s Manfredini’s music over the title sequence. There are familiar locations and characters. There are even little details that recall the original movies. It immediately feels like we’re back in the Friday the 13th world.
The next group of episodes, directed by Celine Held and Logan George, contains some of the best sequences of the entire season. Their ability to recreate moments from the original Friday the 13th is heartwarming and impressive, and the use of Blairstown makes those recreations even more effective.
The season’s last couple of episodes, directed by Quyen Tran, are more uneven. The origin flashback is my least favorite episode of the season. The finale is underwhelming in places because it feels like the show suddenly realizes it’s running out of time. There is some very good material in the finale, including a tense sequence involving Levon, Pamela, and a group of dangerous outsiders. But some things that could have used more time to play out are handled way too quickly.
That last part is frustrating because the show has spent so much time on other material that, by the time it reaches the conclusion, some of the things I actually wanted to spend more time with are being rushed toward the finish line.
I didn’t love every minute of every episode. I didn’t care about every storyline. I didn’t love the mythology expansion. There are things I would have changed or left out entirely, but I loved spending time in this world again. There is something very satisfying about seeing Camp Crystal Lake, the town, the woods, Ralph, Pamela, and all of these familiar pieces of Friday the 13th history brought together in a new story.
And the show isn’t afraid to get weird, either. Sometimes that weirdness works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But after so many years of waiting for another major Friday the 13th project, I’m glad we got something that feels so immersed in the history of the franchise. I want to see Jason back in the hockey mask, going after another group of ill-fated youths, just as much as any other fan. But I was surprised by just how nice it was to visit with Pam again.
Crystal Lake is interested in Pamela Voorhees and in Jason before he became the Jason we know. It’s interested in the town and the mythology. It’s interested in the people who will eventually become part of the legend. There are times when its affection for Friday the 13th is almost overwhelming. Seeing the original locations, recreated moments, hearing Manfredini’s music, watching familiar characters return, and recognizing little details from the movies made me very happy.
There are also moments when the show is determined to tell me things I didn’t really want to know. That’s the trade-off.
Crystal Lake is simultaneously a loving tribute to Friday the 13th and an attempt to reinvent parts of its mythology. Those two ideas don’t always mesh, but for me, the good outweighs the bad. Yes, there are questionable elements, but I really enjoyed Crystal Lake, and I really hope we get a second season. There are years of Friday the 13th history to fill in between the end of this season and the beginning of the original movie, and I’m very interested to find out what Crystal Lake would do with them.