A brutish attacker violently throws Pamela Voorhees, played by Linda Cardellini, into a set of closet doors, shattering them and knocking her, momentarily dazed, to the floor of her home in the upcoming Peacock prequel series “Crystal Lake.”
The newly minted Emmy winner, embodying a younger version of iconic serial killer Jason’s vengeful mom from the 1980 slasher movie “Friday the 13th,” suddenly wields a machete and brutally makes mincemeat of her attacker’s face. The screen fills with Cardellini’s horrified, wide-eyed and openmouthed reaction, which is crosscut with close-ups of her victim’s revolting disfigurements to intentionally campy effect.
“It’s absolutely supposed to be funny because it is so shocking,” showrunner Brad Caleb Kane tells The Washington Post with a slight smile during a Zoom interview alongside Cardellini, who recalls asking him during filming, “Should we take this a little more serious?”
The eight-episode show, premiering just ahead of Halloween on Thursday, serves up a frightening familial origin story that blurs the line between whether a bloody scene should be horrifying, hilarious or a twisted combination of both.
If you cracked up when Kevin Bacon’s postcoital camp counselor was killed with an arrow through his throat in “Friday the 13th,” or actor Betsy Palmer’s hands flailed and her head went flying in comical slow-mo as her Pamela Voorhees was decapitated — well, buckle up. The adaptation’s use of laughter as an emotional buffer firmly aligns with a genre that has often offered camp to eclipse carnage.
In 1981, Sam Raimi launched his uber-gory “The Evil Dead” trilogy, which served as a terrifying template for filmmakers. The Post called his 1987 sequel “a horror classic that elicits equal parts of giggling and gagging.” That same decade, wisecracking “A Nightmare on Elm Street” slasher Freddy Krueger and the menacing Chucky doll from “Child’s Play” established their own cheeky, long-running franchises.
More recently, the creepy, murderous robot from 2022’s “M3GAN” was fodder for Halloween costumes, as was Amy Madigan’s “unhinged” Oscar-winning portrayal of clownish Aunt Gladys in the 2025 blockbuster “Weapons.” One could expect the same for this year’s sapphic surprise, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” the blood-drenched homage to “Friday the 13th.”
Greg Semenza, a professor at the University of Connecticut, tells The Post that the “counterintuitive” pairing of laughter and disgust actually makes sense.
“No audience wants to laugh more than an audience that is scared, right?” says Semenza, who teaches a popular genre history course called “The Horror Film” that boasts 200 students this semester alone.
“There’s a rhythm that can be established where we’re kind of forced into these situations of basically tightening up and holding our breath,” he adds. “And the little kind of comedic beat can really give us a sense of relief. If the artificiality of it — the camp factor — is high enough, it creates detachment that makes it more palatable.”
Of course, not every movie and TV adaptation finds reason to tickle the funny bone. “It’s not to say all horror has to work that way,” Semenza says.
One new reboot taking a more serious turn is the Amazon Prime series “Carrie,” a retelling of Stephen King’s 1974 novel about a teen with telekinetic powers who is harassed by high school bullies; her tormentors go so far as drenching her in pig’s blood at her senior prom, where she uses her terrifying abilities to exact fiery revenge.
A 1976 film adaptation by Brian De Palma starred Sissy Spacek as the put-upon title character, with Piper Laurie portraying what one reviewer called her “towering psycho diva” of a mother. Laurie’s performance lands “right on the edge of what we might call camp,” Semenza asserts.
The new show from “The Haunting of Hill House” director Mike Flanagan eschews comedic relief, instead focusing on the all-too-real, 21st-century issue of cyberbullying.
“The themes we are exploring are relevant to today’s teenagers in such a profound way that wasn’t true when I was that age, much less when Stephen [King] was,” Flanagan recently told Britain’s Radio Times of his show’s somber tone, which is streaming in its entirety on Prime.
“Today, kids deal with a level of anxiety at school that I couldn’t have contemplated when I was growing up and the horror of being a teen today is so different from 1976, and this was a wonderful opportunity to explore that.”
“Crystal Lake,” though, sticks with making people cringe and chuckle, rather than just dousing them in blood and guts — though the latter is key to making the former work.
Much of the campy payoff in “Crystal Lake” stems from the show’s hundreds of uncomfortably gory prostheses, conceived by Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated makeup master Dave Presto.
“I never was squeamish at the sight of blood,” a genial Presto reveals in an interview, joking that his computer research itself is a horror show. “I’m typing all these things in there, like, ‘How to kill someone this way.’ You know, the FBI — I’m probably on their watch list, for sure.”
But he understands why audiences would find humor in his ghastly creations, whether a victim’s disturbingly crushed jaw or an eyeball that comically pops out of its socket and dangles.
“You’re hitting them with the horror, and then you’re lightening up with a little bit of this campiness,” Presto says. “But then you smack them again with the horror, so it’s like it keeps it off-balance and makes it more entertaining.”
Cardellini recalls being drenched in a barrage of blood for what she calls a “kill opera” in the first episode. “It’s a lot,” she says, adding, “I can’t complain, though, because a lot of people wore those crazy prostheses, and I was just grateful that that wasn’t me.”
However, Cardellini’s “true disgust” at seeing Presto’s maimed characters only boosted Kane’s dedication to camp.
“I didn’t know her reaction was going to be as authentically outsized as it was,” a giddy Kane explains in the interview alongside Cardellini.
He seems even more thrilled that her mortified mug could be headed toward social media infamy.
“We’re all watching it on the monitor, going, ‘Oh, s—, that’s a meme!’” he recalls of capturing her unintentionally hilarious response to the bloody prostheses, adding with a laugh, “You can put anything on top of that!”
A dismayed Cardellini shakes her head, murmuring, “Oh, no. … Oh, no,” perhaps realizing that the show’s camp factor could haunt her — and fans — for days, weeks or even years.
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