‘Crystal Lake’ Peacock Review: Linda Cardellini Plays Pamela Voorhees in a Series That Revisits the Events Behind ‘Friday the 13th’

In yet another sign that nobody in Hollywood has an original idea anymore (or, more accurately, that studios would rather mine familiar IP than take a new risk), the serialized remake of Carrie has barely landed before the small-screen version of Friday the 13th —the 1980 film that belongs to the same hugely successful run of horror hits from that era— arrives. Unlike the Carrie series, which retells both Stephen King’s novel and Brian De Palma’s movie, Crystal Lake is better understood as a spin-off or variation, one that digs deeper into Pamela Voorhees, mother of Jason, the character who would become known as the hockey-masked killer, even though he wasn’t one at the start.

A little prehistory is needed to explain the world Crystal Lake inhabits. Anyone who doesn’t know the original and wants to keep it that way before watching the series can skip this paragraph, since it spoils the film directed by Sean S. Cunningham. In that first movie, it’s Pamela who avenges the death of her young son, Jason, who drowned in the lake at a summer camp called Crystal Lake in 1957. She does it more than 20 years later, when the camp reopens. The sequels moved the spotlight to Jason himself, who, to cut a long and convoluted story short, was made to survive that drowning so he could come back and take his own revenge.

The series changes that story, at least in part. It begins in the late ’70s with Pamela (Linda Cardellini), who works as a cook at the camp, and her son, Jason, who has hydrocephalus. The boy, shown here as a sweet, gentle kid, is relentlessly mocked by the other children. During a moment when no one is watching, he ends up alone in the middle of the lake and, apparently, drowns. Pamela dives in to save him and can’t. His body is never found. Up to this point, aside from the change of era, there are no major departures.

The camp shuts down for nine months, but the following year its owners, desperate for income, reopen it. Pamela is furious. What the series adds, and what becomes one of its central threads, is the arrival of two men who say they’re with the police and come looking for her. It’s obvious they aren’t who they claim to be. Pamela realizes it too, and finds a way to get rid of them, a decidedly brutal one. In the process, it becomes clear that this woman has a troubled past and that these men know something about it.

Exploring that backstory is, in large part, what the series sets out to do from here on. It strays from the original plot to dig into other aspects of the character, but it keeps circling back to the events at the heart of the story: Jason’s death and the revenge she carries out. Besides Pamela, the key figures in this version are Officer Levon Brooks (William Catlett), who takes her side, at least at first, out of sympathy for the loss of her son, and his wife, Briana (Devin Kessler), who wants no part of that closeness. Meanwhile, the kids and counselors at the camp watch as the once-friendly Mrs. Voorhees slowly loses her composure and her sanity in her plan to avenge her boy.

The show’s creator, who has worked on similar projects such as It: Welcome to Derry, as well as Warrior and Tokyo Vice, among others, draws on the iconography, music and costumes of the ’70s. Crystal Lake blends contemporary storytelling with a period aesthetic, retro in spirit. Viewers who recently saw the horror film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and didn’t know where so many of its references and its look came from will find nearly all of it here.

In the episodes made available to critics, the series doesn’t stray far from the formula. It recovers and replicates the look and themes of the original film, with a healthy dose of gore and violence. The star of the recent DTF St. Louis is the undisputed lead and does a great deal to carry the show, bringing emotional complexity to a character who had none in the movies. Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly needed there. But in this eight-hour version of stories we’ve only known in shorter, leaner forms, that complexity is more than welcome.