Crystal Lake Creator on the Big Revelations About Pamela and Jason Voorhees

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the entire first season of Crystal Lake. Read at your own risk!]

The eight-episode season of Crystal Lake is now out in its entirety on Peacock, delivering what series creator and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has referred to as a "spiritual prequel" to the original Friday the 13th. Telling the story of Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) before the events of the 1980 horror film that began the beloved franchise — where she was played by Betsy Palmer — the series is set in the early 1970s, as we follow Pamela's increasingly unhinged and murderous reactions to the drowning of her young son, Jason (Callum Vinson).

But the show had plenty of curveballs in store too, including huge revelations about what Pam and Jason went through even before they lived in Crystal Lake. As it turned out, Pamela's husband, Elias (Midnight Mass and Widow's Bay's Hamish Linklater, in a surprise recurring role), worked for a powerful corporation, and he was in on a plan in the late '50s and early '60s to let Pam and Jason — without her knowledge — be part of an experiment to try and change human biology to better survive what they felt was an impending nuclear war. These experiments would result in Jason's physical deformities but also account, for the first time, for just how indestructible and unkillable Jason would be throughout the Friday the 13th films. And at the same time, they messed with Pam's mind, leading to her own insanity.

The season ended with Elias tracking down Pam in Crystal Lake, only for Jason (now played by Jonathan Tison), having grown much larger in the year since his supposed drowning and wearing the one-eyed sack mask the character wore in Friday the 13th Part 2 when he took over for his mom as the series' killer, to intervene and brutally kill Elias. Pam, meanwhile, was now as far gone as when we met her in 1980, but had managed to make the many murders she'd committed throughout the season — including an early massacre at Camp Crystal Lake — always look like the work of others.

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Kane spoke to TV Guide about these big revelations and how they came to be, working with Linklater, and getting to portray this younger version of Jason as a killer, years before he gets his iconic hockey mask in Friday the 13th Part 3. Kane also discussed the original character Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), Jason's young friend before the drowning, who goes on a harrowing and ultimately murderous path herself. And he gave some hints at what he has in mind for future seasons of the show, should he get the opportunity, including why he's not especially eager to actually retell the events of Friday the 13th and having more in store both for his original characters and for legacy characters from the films like Ralph Neeley, aka Crazy Ralph (Nick Cordileone).

TV Guide: I'm sure you're well aware that with anything like this, it's always going to be divisive as far as what fans think about additions to the history of characters they love.
Brad Caleb Kane: Yeah, and for me, the origin story that we went with here, it all went in service of strengthening Pam's character. If this was a woman who desperately ultimately wanted to stay pregnant with the baby she had, and there are issues that someone in her husband's camp are saying we can help you with, it felt to me very much of the period. It felt to me very much of the 1970s sort of mistrust of institutions and paranoid '70s thriller vibes that I wanted to dig into. I love those movies. I love The Parallax View and the Parallax Corporation and the idea of sinister and shady entities doing things to us behind our backs that we can't control; that they ultimately are in control of our minds and our bodies. And it felt like because these movies sort of came out of that decade, that was appropriate if we were going to delve into the Pam and Jason story and understand why she felt messed with and why she got super protective over her son and why she became the person that we know from the first movie.

So there is a healthy amount of invention there, but there's a healthy amount of invention in all the movies, and now it was my turn. If the killer can be an ambulance driver in [Friday the 13th] Part V, and Jason can become Frankenstein in Part VI, and he can fight Carrie in Part VII and get mowed down by toxic waste in Part VIII, why can't I root it in this? This was my shot in the ring to try something and add a little something to the canon. And because the canon is so shaky, if you reject it, you reject it.

…But it's true. This is how Jason was formed! [Laughs]

You also got to be the one to finally introduce Elias, Jason's father. Was it interesting figuring out who that character is? And then to get Hamish Linklater to play him, which was a really fun surprise.
Kane: Well, again, we wanted to dive into these themes of mistrust of government institutions and mistrust of corporate institutions, which is a big theme for today. Also manipulation of women, taking away agency, gaslighting, all that kind of stuff felt ripe not only for today but of the time that these movies came out in. So it was fun to make Elias a businessman of that time. Obviously, we do an episode that has a Mad Men feel to it, and so yeah, it was fun just to be inventive with Elias, to see where Pam came from, to see how she was manipulated.

Betsy Palmer in 1980 was in her early 50s and seeing Pam 20 years earlier, you wonder… A woman of her time, of the late 1950s, of the early '60s, how does that speak to the creation of Jason or the creation of the person we know Pam to become in the movies? So it was just fun to dive into all that and figure out who her husband would have been. And Hamish was totally game to dig right into that Don Draper vibe, or Don Draper by way of David Cronenberg vibe. Widow's Bay hadn't come out yet. I only knew Hamish from Midnight Mass, but that's enough. You watch that performance, and it's so masterful and draws you in. His soliloquies, his performance are just virtuosic, and we were very lucky to get him. It was easy too. I just called him up and I was like, "Hey, I have this part. You'd play Jason Voorhees' dad." He was like, "I'm in. I'm in. Say no more." "Don't you even want to hear what we're going to do with the part?" "Nope. Jason Voorhees' dad, I am in." And that was even before Widow's Bay. So this is a guy who loves and appreciates horror too, and he really brought it.

And he got to be killed by having Jason Voorhees crush his head.
Kane: You've got to have Jason Voorhees crush a head!

In success, do you have multiple seasons of this show in mind? Because obviously, there's original characters like Brooks and Grace that are still in play and questions to be answered about them and their whereabouts by the first film.
Kane: Yeah, and legacy characters from the town. Crazy Ralph, Ralph Neeley; Officer Dorf; all of those characters. So yes, I do have multiple seasons in mind. I do have an arc. I know exactly where it would go in Season 2. Hopefully Linda had a good enough time that she wants to come play in the sandbox again. There are also a lot of side stories to explore with those legacy characters and with Jason, knowing that he's out in the woods now. I hope we get to do more. I hope people enjoy it and want to continue that journey.

I imagine it was exciting to get to portray the older, and maybe not fully grown, but bigger Jason in the finale, wearing the sack head mask from Part 2?
Kane: Oh my God, it was thrilling just being out there with him. We always knew you can't do a Friday the 13th prequel without Jason, and we always knew that you can't do it without a mask of some kind. Obviously, the hockey mask is iconic, but we haven't seen a lot of sack head Jason. So it was very, very exciting to be able to give people a little extended look at Jason in another form and to see what else he was doing in that sack out in the woods.

Should we assume he skinned that girl earlier in the season and put her at Ralph's place? Because that was pretty brutal, even for Jason!
Kane: He sure did. It's that old trope of the kid finding his dad's stash of pot. "I learned it by watching you, Dad! I learned by watching you!" Ralph talks about it later with Pam. Jason came out of the lake almost mindless and he's been watching like a baby, kind of learning how things are done. So he comes out of that lake a little bit more of a blank slate. Maybe those memories are there, but deep under the surface, and he's learning what people do again and how to be human. He's a little bit like a baby duck, but unfortunately, the only person he has to really learn from is the hermit in the woods, and that's Ralph catching rabbits, skinning them, hanging them up. And when he does that to that hippie, it's a way of communication, really. Initially, it's like "I'm going to do what you do, but with this first person that I found in one of your traps."

You have a really fun episode where we get to see Pamela unleashed at Camp Crystal Lake, killing a different group of people, while wearing her famous blue sweater.
Kane: Full Friday the 13th!

If this show goes multiple seasons, do you see it covering its own version of the original movie's events, perhaps from a different perspective?
Kane: Maybe… But does anybody want to see the same movie made over again from a different perspective? I don't know... We have the original movie. I don't want to watch it from somebody else's perspective. I'd rather watch different stories within that universe. And obviously we have a whole decade till we get up to the events of that movie in the world of the TV show. So I'd rather see other stories within Crystal Lake before the events of the first movie that feel like they put the first movie in a slightly different context or change your understanding of it a little bit without changing the movie itself. That's more interesting to me, to play with the years before the movie and those characters you know, and really see the journey of how they became the characters in that first movie. That's interesting to me, but not remaking the movie from a different perspective.

Grace is a really interesting, kind of a wild card inclusion, who ultimately does end up becoming a killer in the show. What was the inciting idea to come up with that character and to give Jason someone who was kinder to him as a child than the other kids?
Kane: It's nice for him to have a friend! It was really just to not be relentlessly cruel to Jason, and not to do that to the audience. To see that there is goodness in the world, but goodness is also corrupted in this world, and I think that's something that happens to Grace too. I think she is inherently good as a character, and then the circumstances surrounding it... She can't avoid all of this stuff that's right in her face all the time, and that was an aspect of the decade that I wanted to dive into through Grace. Those things that I loved in the late '70s, early '80s — the ABC Afterschool Special, that sort of gauzy preoccupation with teenage juvenile delinquency and drugs and sex. I wanted to see all that stuff just shoved in Grace's face as she's at this delicate age, trying to figure out who she is, and to see how all of this stuff has a pretty detrimental effect on her. Somebody that we know was kind to Jason gets corrupted in a different way as she's trying to find herself.

There's a long way to go with Grace. We have a lot of stories in mind for her. And the actress who plays her, Gwendolyn Sundstrom, was really brand new, and hadn't done anything. I had seen all of these actresses who had so many credits and many of them very good actors, but Gwen came with a purity and an authenticity that I think comes through in the show too. She's a real kid.

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What's your favorite kill or gory moment in the season?
Kane: Lots to choose from! I think the killing of Grace's mom is pretty shocking and how that goes down. That's a fun one. And it was a fun one to film, with the jaw hanging off. I like when Pam goes full Friday the 13th [in Episode 6]. I like the way she decided to stab, because it feels like The Terminator. You see the moment she becomes truly psychotic and gleefully psychotic because the stabbing is... The only way I would describe it is enthusiastic. She is an enthusiastic stabber in that moment, and I think it's exhilarating for the audience once that pops off. So that's probably my favorite.

Pam's gone over a pretty big edge here. If you get to go forward, will it be more about her maintaining her mask in front of the rest of the town now that she's this far gone?
Kane: Absolutely. She says it in the show — it is about masks. The theme of masks or the motif of masks, and not all masks are sack heads and hockey masks. Some are the ones that we put on ourselves to hide our true faces from the world. So yeah, it'll be fun to see how she maintains it. And obviously, she can't maintain all the time, and how all the little indignities of town and of the time continue to chip away at that facade she puts on. And the most fun is seeing when that facade falls away entirely, and she delightfully slaughters. It's like what Nicole Kidman says for AMC movie theaters… "We come to this place for slaughter."

Lastly, I have to ask, did you consider introducing Crazy Ralph's wife? Because there's this weird line in the first movie about him having a wife at home and I've always wondered who would be married to this guy?
Kane: Yeah, totally! You might hear more about that in Season 2. We have discussed that. So yes, all the characters are fair game, and anybody can pop up.

Crystal Lake Season 1 is now streaming on Peacock.