Crystal Lake Showrunner on Retelling the Friday the 13th Story: ‘It's Always Ripe for Reinterpretation’

Spoilers follow for the first episode of Crystal Lake , which debuts on Peacock on October 15!

The cast and creator of Crystal Lake showed up at New York Comic Con this week to prep fans for their Friday the 13th sequel series as they prepare for its launch next week. That included a panel discussion, a Camp Crystal Lake activation experience , and a screening of the first episode of the show. I also got a chance to talk to the group about the long-awaited return to the hunting grounds of Jason Voorhees… and his mom Pamela. Don’t forget about Pamela!

We’ll have a full season review of Crystal Lake in a few days, but for now I’m going to break down the biggest points from Episode 1, as well as some thoughts from showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, star Linda Cardellini, and the other cast members who were in attendance. So let’s take a swim in the lake…!

Right out of the gate, the episode gives us Linda Cardellini’s Pamela covered in blood, leaning over a bathroom sink and staring at herself in the mirror. She finds a human tooth embedded in one of her knuckles and says to herself, “What did you do…?”

Of course, we know from 1980’s original Friday the 13th movie that Pam has some slicing and dicing skills. For while her son Jason is the main slasher of the franchise, it was actually Pam who was the killer in that first film, having gone mad after her son drowned (or seemed to drown – more on that in a second) at Camp Crystal.

What becomes clear as the first episode of Crystal Lake proceeds is that while this version of Pam isn’t insane (or perhaps, isn’t insane yet ), she definitely is capable of violence.

“There's a switch,” the actress, who just won an Emmy for the HBO series DTF St. Louis, tells me. “If you flip it with her, there's no going back. It's almost like she doesn't even understand what she's doing. If someone flips that switch, there's a loss of control for her. In a way, she's looking for control and then she loses it at the same time. That's the dangerous dance there.”

“I like to think there's nobody more dangerous than a mother whose child is threatened,” adds Brad Caleb Kane.

“Also, it’s somebody you don't expect,” continues Cardellini. “I think that's part of it that I really enjoyed – is that here's this person who you can kind of relate to, but there's a massive rage underneath there that if you tap into it and start to open that Pandora's box, you can't put that genie back in the bottle.”

Adds the showrunner: “At a certain point, maybe it also feels a little good to let that genie happen.”

Everyone knows Jason Voorhees’ origin story, right? It’s like required reading in schools these days, isn’t it? But what’s interesting about the master of hockey mask couture is that we’ve never really seen much of his childhood, despite his appearing in 12 movies (ish – he’s actually dead in the fifth film) to date, and decades of various ancillary media. Yes, we know he was deformed in some way, and that though believed drowned, the adult Jason took over the teenager-killing duties at Camp Crystal after his mother died in the first film.

But in Crystal Lake, Caleb Kane has decided to give us a young Jason (played by Callum Vinson, who’s also appeared in the Chucky TV series) who is just a cute kid who happens to be a person with some kind of physical disability. And yes, that includes a large, malformed head. I asked the showrunner how he landed on this portrayal of Jason.

“Invention and being really well versed in the movies,” he says. “The end of the first movie, he really is – the way [make-up effects legend Tom] Savini built him, he's sort of monstrous and he's meant just to be this idea that sent Pam on her journey. But if we're doing a show about how Pam lost him, you want to see the connection between mother and child. You want Jason to be a real 11-year-old boy, obviously with differences and difficulties. The iteration of Jason here really came out of the point where we were making a show about a relationship between mother and child. What is that? Who is Jason within the context of that relationship? How does losing him set Pam on this journey? So that's where it came from.”

Cardellini adds that her son is “everything to Pam” but also “he's everything to the franchise.” Indeed, it would’ve been odd to do this show and not include Jason in some way.

“She just loves him more than anything,” says the actress. “Brad wrote this line that they're connected at the heart, and I think that is really at the core of it all – that she never feels disconnected from him. I think the codependency and the inter-connectedness is very, very deep and almost, I don't know, telepathic.”

Since this show is the origin story of Jason as much as it’s Pam’s story, there are certain key moments in the timeline that just have to happen. And certainly one of the most important of those is Jason drowning while the camp counselors aren’t paying attention – as Betsy Palmer’s version of Pam says in the first film, “They were making love while that young boy drowned!” And so it goes in Episode 1 of Crystal Lake that Jason must drown in order for Pam’s journey to really begin.

But Jason can’t really be dead, can he? The question for a show like this is how the writers can build a full season of television without violating the canon that’s already been established… Unless there’s room to change some things, that is.

“I mean, if you watch the [film] series, it changes things from movie to movie,” says Caleb Kane. “I think there's always room and I think it's always ripe for reinterpretation. I think fans of the franchise are going to love certain movies and they don't love certain movies and the fandom is pretty rabid. As a longtime fan, as somebody who knows these movies, their novelizations, all of the things sort of chapter and verse, I felt like I had a little bit of license to play. Also, you’ve got to make sure that you give the fans what they want.”

One area where Caleb Kane and the writers seem to be taking some license is in where Jason and Pam came from before arriving at Crystal Lake. There is a hint of a past involving something called “Argonaut” – we just see a flashback with that name on a door at the end of a long corridor. What does it all mean? We’ll have to wait and see…

The showrunner does offer a hint, however: “What you learn about [Pam] later on in the series is that she did a lot to protect him and get him out of a pretty difficult situation, and herself. When you put that amount of attention on protecting someone and loving someone, their absence is going to be that much more acute.”

Remember what I said about Pam and the tooth embedded in her knuckle? Well, just wait until you see how that tooth winds up where it does. Basically, Crystal Lake gives fans plenty of blood and over-the-top gore… and there’s some sex thrown in there as well.

“The thing has to go full Friday the 13th at a certain point,” says Caleb Kane. “We made sure we did that in the show.”

At the same time, these scenes – at least as far as the pilot episode goes – don’t just feature sex and violence for the sake of it. They help drive the plot and also give us insight into the characters. That said, there’s one scene here that approaches a gross-out level that is just plain funny – in a good way. You gotta see it for yourself, so I won’t even try to explain it.

The Other Residents of Crystal Lake Are Pretty Interesting Too

As a TV series, Crystal Lake needs a supporting cast, and some of the folks we meet are pretty interesting. William Catlett plays Sheriff Levon Brooks, a friend of Pam’s who used to be a cop in the city and seems a bit adrift out in the woods of Crystal Lake. He might also be interested in Pam as perhaps more than a friend, but knowing where she’s heading as we do, that doesn’t seem destined to work out for the sheriff.

“You know, I think you can have two things, two wishes at the same time within your mind,” says Catlett of playing the character, even though he knows where Pam will end up one day. “You love Pam, you want to be with Pam, it's a new beginning, but at the same time it's like, who is this woman? And so if I don't judge it, then I can allow myself to have those emotions that go through with it.”

Gwendolyn Sundstrom plays a character named Grace who is in her early teens and is one of Jason’s only friends. When he seemingly dies, it sends her on a trajectory that could be dangerous for the young girl.

“I think it's losing the most important person in your life,” says Sundstrom. “Losing Jason, to Grace, is something that brings a lot of trauma, and I think that definitely plays into the rest of the season too. It’s something that Grace really struggles with, and she doesn't want it to happen. She definitely wants it to reverse.”

There are also a couple of legacy characters from the first film who pop up as younger versions of themselves, including “Crazy” Ralph (played by Walt Gorney in the original series and Nick Cordileone in Crystal Lake) and Officer Dorf (played by Ron Millkie in the first film and Cameron Scoggins in Crystal Lake). Dorf actually survives the original movie, which means Scoggins has something of an insurance policy here!

“Yeah, he makes it!” laughs Scoggins. “He doesn't die as far as we know in the first movie. We'll see. He appears so briefly in that first movie that you almost do have to go back and watch it sometimes, but it is a memorable little character, and you kind of wonder, where's that guy coming from? And it's just so fun to take such a brief scene and expand upon that and just take the energy of a different actor and be like, well, how are we going to build on this more?”

We’ll see how Crystal Lake builds on the Friday the 13th canon more when it debuts on Peacock on October 15…

Talk to Scott Collura @scottcollura.bsky.social , or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3 . Or do both!