Linda Cardellini is pretty sure she saw “Friday the 13th,” the sicko summer camp slasher film, at a movie theater with her brothers.
“I acted cool by pretending not to be afraid, but I was terrified,” the actress said during a recent video interview. “It was a challenge for me just to be able to sit through it.”
Fast forward to this Thursday the 15th, when Cardellini will generate scares herself: That’s when Peacock starts streaming “Crystal Lake,” its new eight-episode “Friday the 13th” prequel series. (The first three “Friday the 13th” films are also streaming there.)
Cardellini plays one of horror cinema’s most beloved mama bears: Pamela Voorhees, mother to Jason Voorhees, the hockey mask-wearing butcher of the “Friday the 13th” film franchise.
Cardellini said she was drawn to the role — played with sheer frenzy by Betsy Palmer in the 1980 original — because it centers on and humanizes a mother who also (spoiler alert!) turns out to be the killer in the first “Friday the 13th” film.
“She sets everything in motion,” Cardellini said. “I love the idea of the making of the monster by perhaps another monster.”
Like “Carrie” and “Candyman,” “Crystal Lake” is a horror story that makes a tough ask: to feel sympathy for a devil. Brad Caleb Kane, the “Crystal Lake” showrunner, who joined Cardellini on video, said that focusing on Pam was a way “to really see how she became the mother of all slashers.”
Or, as “Wicked” put it: “Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”
Cardellini is no stranger to playing complex, dark-sided women. Most recently she starred in HBO’s “DTF St. Louis” as Carol, an icy but sexually frisky umpire and mother-protector. The role earned Cardellini her first Emmy Award.
Is there a through line from Carol to Pam? “They’re both looking for control in situations they don’t have control in,” Cardellini said. “I think they’re both trying to help their sons in the world.”
But, she added, Pam is unhinged and violent, “so not the same at all.”
A refresher: In the original “Friday the 13th,” directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Mrs. Voorhees slaughters randy young camp counselors to avenge Jason, who drowned at his summer camp while the two counselors who were supposed to be watching him had sex.
In “Crystal Lake,” produced by the indie studio A24, Pam is a young single mother and Jason is a child (played by Callum Vinson) with a pronounced cranial deformity. The two share a tight bond: After Jason is assumed to have drowned at the camp where Pam is a cook, her grief elicits empathy and compassion, qualities not normally associated with “Friday the 13th.”
It helps that Vinson, as Cardellini put it, “has a little darling face.”
“When you see him with a prosthetic on, I mean, it’s really not hard to feel like you want to protect Jason,” she said.
“Friday the 13th” was an unexpected box office hit for Paramount in 1980. And Jason didn’t actually die, as indicated by the 11 subsequent films in which he did lots of killing in locations including the underworld (“Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday”) and outer space (“Jason X”). (The franchise made more dollars than sense.)
Steve Jones, a horror scholar at Northumbria University in Britain, said the first film took off partly because “it was a whodunit narrative” with Pam as the reveal.
“People wanted to know who the killer was, and so they latched on to her when they found out,” he said. Even though Pam is an unstable killer, Jones added, fans were forgiving and encouraging of a mother in mourning for her tormented son.
“If my child died under those circumstances, I’d probably flip out too,” he said.
“Crystal Lake” does not shy away from violence and over-the-top gore, the kind of stuff Kane said he loved from “Re-Animator” and other “janky handmade horror pictures” from the 1980s. In “Crystal Lake,” Pam leaves one victim’s jaws barely clinging to his head. Another gruesome attack involves a deep fryer and a head that comes out looking like a beer-battered onion ring.
That’s the grisly stuff the “Friday the 13th” fandom has been thirsty for since 2022, when Peacock announced the series was happening with Bryan Fuller as showrunner. (He left in 2024 because of creative differences.) No wonder: The last franchise film, a reboot called “Friday the 13th,” came out 17 years ago. Since then, fans have had to make do with other content, including a hit video game and a seven-hour documentary.
The delay was caused in part by a complicated legal battle over copyright involving Victor Miller, who wrote the screenplay for the original “Friday the 13th.” Miller won the case in 2018, allowing him to reclaim the domestic rights to the franchise and clearing the way for “Crystal Lake.” He died last month at 86.
“Crystal Lake” isn’t the first “Friday the 13th” series. That would be “Friday the 13th: The Series,” a syndicated show that ran for three seasons from 1987 to 1990. Despite the title, it had nothing to do with the films, and Jason isn’t in it. (It was about an antique shop with cursed objects that kill people.)
“Crystal Lake” more closely mirrors other horror movie origin series, including “Bates Motel,” a prequel to “Psycho,” and “It: Welcome to Derry.” Kane is a showrunner on the “It” series.
“Crystal Lake” joins other series based on cherished modern-era horror films. This month Amazon released the first series-length version of “Carrie,” adapted by Mike Flanagan. On Tubi, there is “Freddy’s Nightmares,” a late-1980s anthology series inspired by “Nightmare on Elm Street.” Peacock has three seasons of “Chucky,” based on the “Child’s Play” films.
Fans have spent years speculating about how “Crystal Lake” will treat its source material (and, after watching the trailer, wondering if Jason will be revealed to be a government experiment). Kane said the series, which is set in the early ’70s, takes its cues from slasher films and paranoia thrillers of that decade and the 1980s, a horror golden age.
“The identity crisis that America was having paralleled perfectly that identity crisis that Pam goes on in the wake of losing her son,” he said.
And if that means “Friday the 13th” fans might rip “Crystal Lake” a new one? “I’ll debate with horror nerds as much as they want,” Kane said.
One aficionado eager to watch “Crystal Lake” is Jason Parker, who runs a “Friday the 13th” fan website. He said the franchise has endured for so long “not just because of the death and the killing but because of the characters.”
“Even though these were considered schlock films by critics and were dismissed, over time people have come to appreciate that the characters were people they could relate to, like a mom losing her child,” he said.
That said, he’s keeping expectations in check.
“I’m all for something different,” he said. “But we’ve had Jason in space and in hell. I don’t think anything’s going to be as crazy as that.”
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