The Friday the 13th franchise has been on ice for more than a decade. After the 2009 reboot of the series managed to revive the slasher killer Jason for a new generation, he just as quickly went away, held hostage not by the chains of hell but by the legal ramifications of the United States copyright law. In that time, countless other horror movie franchises have been revived and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, and the Halloween franchise also officially lapped Friday the 13th in terms of total movies, actually making it to the 13th film beforehand.
Now, though, the series has cleared its biggest hurdles in decades and is on track to return. Though new movies are seemingly in development and on the way, Friday the 13th fans are going to see the series return like never before with Crystal Lake, a prequel TV show that digs into the material in a new way. Peacock and A24 have released the first full teaser trailer for Crystal Lake, offering a first look at the new series that premieres this fall, which also confirms how it will be taking its cues from the entire Friday the 13th franchise.
Though very brief, the teaser trailer for Crystal Lake establishes a couple of things. First among those is the jovial camper atmosphere for the entire setting, something that has almost never actually appeared in the Friday the 13th movies thanks to the killer reputation of “Camp Blood.” In fact, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is the only film in the series to actually have a functioning camp as part of its plot; all the others feature counselors getting ready for the camp’s opening, or, mostly, just horny, drunken friends preparing for a weekend away on the lake.
To that end, though, it’s clear that the “curse” angle of the camp is starting to be built thanks to campfire stories told to susceptible listeners. As noted in the teaser, “it all started when that kid drowned last summer,” implying that the initial death of Jason Voorhees has alreayd become something of a legend at Camp Crystal Lake.
The most important thing established by the trailer, though, is Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees. As fans know, Pamela was Jason’s mother and (as Scream reminds fans so often) was actually the original killer in the first film, seeking vengeance for the death of her beloved child by counselors at the camp and then working further to prevent it from re-opening years later. Friday the 13th, though, evolved beyond Pamela in a lot of ways and never really explored her backstory with much detail, trotting her out sometimes as a means of controlling Jason.
As a result, Crystal Lake has a pretty distinct identity that it can follow, digging into the psychology of a grieving mother whose love for her son causes her to snap so much that she takes the lives of countless others and even becomes the basis for the camp’s legendary status.
Fans may recall that in the canon of the original Friday the 13th, Jason is killed in the summer of 1957, with Pamela killing her original victims a year later. Over a decade later, though, marked her killing spree seen in the first film, meaning there’s more than a 10-year gap of story left to tell. Not only does it seem like Crystal Lake will give us a bigger picture of Jason’s early years and his time with his mother before his death, but even more of what Pamela did in the time afterward.
It’s perhaps too much to hope that Crystal Lake can run for ten full seasons, but with more than 17 years since the Friday the 13th franchise has been allowed to deliver anything at all, fans can dare to dream. Plus, there’s a lot of lore that can be explored in this series before it even catches up with the events of the original movie, and hopefully they get the chance to tell all those stories.
Crystal Lake is set to premiere on Peacock on October 15.
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