Crystal Lake Creator on Altering the Timeline of Jason's Death While Delivering the Gore Fans Want

'It's a slasher. You need gallons and gallons and gallons of blood.'

Oct. 9, 2026 at 1:31 p.m. PT

Linda Cardellini, Crystal Lake — Linda Cardellini, *Crystal Lake*
Matt Infante/Peacock

After a very long wait, the Friday the 13th franchise is finally being revived — and it's doing so by going back to its beginning.

The new Peacock series Crystal Lake tells the story of Pamela Voorhees, played by Linda Cardellini. Pamela was, famously, the killer in 1980's original Friday the 13th, where she was played by the late Betsy Palmer, and dispatched everyone she could at the newly reopened Camp Crystal Lake out of a deranged sense of vengeance after her son, Jason, drowned there as a boy thanks to neglectful counselors. Crystal Lake depicts Jason's death early on, and then follows what happens next, as Pamela begins to spiral out of control and toward the events of that first film. That "what happens next" includes both familiar and new characters and also answers questions about Jason himself. Because, of course, despite his apparent drowning, he very much would come back, going on to become the hockey mask-wearing horror icon pretty much everyone can recognize, whether they've seen a Friday the 13th movie or not.

It's been 17 years since the last Friday the 13th movie came out, with multiple attempts at a follow-up to the 2009 entry falling apart for various reasons, before a huge, multi-year legal battle over who controlled the rights to the franchise jammed things up much further. Asked what it felt like to be the one to finally deliver something new to Friday the 13th fans, Crystal Lake executive producer and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane (IT: Welcome to Derry) described it to TV Guide as, "Incredible to know that I'm putting something out there in the franchise again."

Even without the more dramatic buildup, Kane stressed how excited he'd be regardless, remarking, "It's a dream come true that I'm even involved in this franchise at all because I was one of the kids in the early '80s who saw most of these movies in theaters, from Part III in 3D on. I saw all of them in theaters, with giant crowds yelling at the screen on a Saturday night — the perfect way to see these movies. So it's sort of weird and full circle for me to be doing a Friday the 13th project. It's pretty great."

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The timelines they are a-changin'

In the original Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees drowns as a boy in 1957, and that film's prologue — depicting Pamela's presumed first kill — takes place in 1958, before the brunt of the story is set in the circa-1980 era it opened in. Crystal Lake shifts those inciting incidents into the decade leading up to the first film, with Jason drowning in 1971, and the series taking place in 1972. Asked if he'd considered setting the show in the 1950s, Kane revealed he had, but ultimately other considerations won out.

Said Kane, "We talked about maybe setting it in the late '50s or the early '60s; all that kind of stuff. For me, it felt like I wanted the grief to be immediate for Pamela. Obviously, the first movie, it's 20+ years ostensibly after Jason drowned, and she's still haunting the campgrounds, and she's still just as raw as she was the day Jason died, and she realized the camp counselors were negligent. For TV, I wanted that grief to be much more immediate and within a nine-month or year span, so you could really understand that grief."

In terms of it working as a loose prequel, the shift to the 1970s made it easier to include many more established characters from the original film to populate the town in a familiar manner, while also expanding greatly upon the likes of "Crazy" Ralph (Nick Cordileone) and Deputy Dorf (Cameron Scoggins). Meanwhile, Barry and Claudette — the couple killed off in the opening scene of Friday the 13th — are changed from 1950s horny camp counselors to 1970s horny camp counselors, with Phoenix Parnevik and Danielle Kotch taking on the roles.

Acknowledging altering the timeline of Jason's death and the aftermath, Kane said his goal wasn't to make every single thing line up with the original film, even as a ton does intersect, while adding, with a grin, "the movies are not entirely great with the continuity anyway," which this Friday the 13th fan can confirm is definitely true. As Kane put it, "I took some liberties. The movies have taken some liberties. I think fans will also see that there's a lot from the movies — a lot that's lovingly recreated. And they'll see that this was a show that was done by fans. Even though we messed with the timeline a little bit, it is a spiritual prequel. There is a lot from the movies that's in this show, and hopefully they'll go along with us on the ride."

A loving mother and son story

In Friday the 13th, Pamela is an out-of-control psychopath, killing innocent victims. And beyond super-quick flashbacks to his drowning, we only really see Jason after he returns in Friday the 13th Part 2 as a silent, hulking mass murderer in his own right. Crystal Lake therefore is bringing us into new territory by actually depicting the relationship between Pamela and Jason, both in an extended prologue in the first episode and in flashbacks. That also means dimensionalizing the child version of Jason, complete with dialogue for the character for the first time, in a manner that's never occurred across the 12 Friday the 13th movies. 12-year-old actor Callum Vinson — previously seen in the horror realm on Chucky — plays young Jason, wearing extensive prosthetics to give him notable deformities to his head — something glimpsed in the films — that have led to Jason being ostracized and bullied, even as Pamela adores him.

Said Kane, "In order to understand Pamela's grief and empathize with her, and for the audience to go along with her on this journey where you know she does do a lot of harm and where there's a lot of bloodletting, it was important to understand why. And the why at the center of that is the relationship between Jason and Pam. So I think it was important to show that Jason, aside from his deformities and difficulties and challenges, he's a regular 11-year-old boy, at least in his mind. And Pamela wants him to be a regular 11-year-old boy with other kids."

Sadly though, due to how he looks, Jason is continually mocked by other kids, with Kane stressing "Jason is just a regular boy wanting to fit in, but nobody will let him. And I wanted audiences again to be able to empathize with that boy, and then maybe recontextualize their relationship with the masked killer that they know."

As for his recent — and now Emmy-winning — lead actress, Kane said he and Cardellini discussed Betsy Palmer's memorable performance in Friday the 13th and how that would be something they could build their version of Pamela toward. On the visual side, Kane explained, "We talked a lot about the homage of it all and how far do we go? We went so far as to talk about 'Do we do the iconic Betsy Palmer haircut?' We knew we were going to do nods to everything else. We knew we were going to have the sweater [from Friday the 13th]. We knew she was going to become unhinged at one point, in a way that you recognize Betsy Palmer behind her eyes."

Ultimately, Kane said, "We decided not to go as far as the hair, because we definitely wanted Linda to put her own stamp on things and we didn't want people to go, 'Oh, they're just copying Betsy Palmer.' When you get an actress like Linda Cardellini, you want to let her make the character her own, and so those were parts of the discussions. We talked a lot about the journey and the arc and at what point do you start to see the madness behind her eyes? It's very much a season designed as an evolution of madness, and we wanted to make sure that all of the points that lead her to that are very clearly delineated. Not just in the script, but in her performance, there's a lot."

Cardellini was Kane's first choice for the role, and he recalled how after she signed on, they made some changes to what was written, realizing she could convey what they needed in a different manner. "There were a lot of things in the script, lines and stuff that delineate that performance and that evolution to madness, that we crossed out. I just allowed Linda, because of the quality of actress that she is, to do it with her eyes and into the camera, so that people would see the machinations that are happening. Linda's able to communicate that kind of nuance. We had all of those discussions, but we put the camera on her, and it's Linda Cardellini. You just let her cook, so to speak."

Doing right by Friday the 13th

The original Friday the 13th was made in New Jersey, and it would later be solidified that it also took place there. However, none of the follow-ups would ever actually return to film in the Garden State, until now, as Crystal Lake actually went back to Blairstown, the small New Jersey township where the original was shot way back in 1979. Blairstown once more plays the role of the town of Crystal Lake in several scenes, for what Kane described as an "amazing" experience.

Luckily for the production, Blairstown still looks remarkably the same all these decades later, allowing them to fairly easily recreate the 1970s look seen in Friday the 13th, once set dressing added period-accurate touches like public phones (or a gas station listing prices that will make you both laugh and cry at how low they are). We get a great look at Blairstown early on in Friday the 13th, as the character Annie walks into town, and Kane explained how, for one Crystal Lake episode, "We recreated those shots, shot for shot, in the show, specifically to give fans a dopamine hit. We do a lot of that stuff just for the sheer pleasure of it and for the fans."

Unfortunately though, attempts to film in the nearby Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, which played the role of Camp Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th, were turned down by the camp owners. However, they were able to visit and scout at No-Be-Bo-Sco, which also feels essentially preserved in time, including the boathouse seen in the very first scene of the franchise, where Barry and Claudette met their end.

Said Kane, "We have scenes in that boathouse and we wanted to shoot in it. Obviously, they wouldn't let us, so we recreated it. Our great production designer rebuilt and recreated that original boathouse from scratch, [using] the original specs. It looks exactly the same. So we try, with every detail, to do it as lovingly and respectfully as we could for fans, and going back to the OG town was the first step."

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The final step in delivering for the fans? You gotta get bloody and gory with your kill scenes. And Crystal Lake goes big on that front, with some very outrageous and wild deaths.

As Kane put it, "You have to go full gore on Friday the 13th! And I'm such a huge fan of all those gory, bloody, fleshy movies of the '80s. I'm a big fan of From Beyond and all those Stuart Gordon joints. I'm a huge fan of Brian Yuzna's Society, which gets pretty, pretty fleshy. I love Cronenberg. I love body horror. We did sort of a Douglas Sirk meets Cronenberg episode in the season. It's go big or go home with these movies. It's a slasher. You need gallons and gallons and gallons of blood."

All eight episodes of Crystal Lake debut Oct. 15 on Peacock.