Linda Cardellini lets it rip in Peacock's grisly but overlong Crystal Lake

As a prequel to 1980’s Friday The 13th, which spawned 11 more movies, including a Nightmare On Elm Street crossover and a 2009 reboot, Peacock’s Crystal Lake isn’t aiming for originality. It features the horror franchise’s familiar ingredients, like horny and doomed camp counselors dying gruesomely in the atmospheric New Jersey woods and a stellar theme song composed by Harry Manfredini, who scored 10 of the films. What sets Crystal Lake apart, for better and worse, is that it isn’t relentless kills shoved into a digestible 95-minute runtime. The lengthy eight-episode season exists to flesh out Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini, taking over the role from Betsy Palmer), who audiences barely met before she was decapitated at the end of Friday The 13th and her son took over as a masked killer. In giving her a distressing backstory that spins its wheels, Crystal Lake successfully deepens the character, but messes with the franchise’s mythology. 

If the first few films were slaughterfests that hardly touched upon any larger iconoclastic themes (considering most of the victims were independent youth subverting authority and engaging in drugs and premarital sex at camp), then the show’s ethos is a try-hard “monsters aren’t born, they’re made.” Series creator Brad Caleb Kane reframes Friday The 13th‘s lore with a more modern-day horror mindset of grief as the true monster. (A line from the show, “trauma actually makes him stronger,” refers to Jason, but it applies to his mom as well). The franchise alters the lore and timeline, changing the year of Jason Voorhees’ (Chucky‘s Callum Vinson) accidental drowning from 1957 to 1971. Before he “dies,” the show offers a glimpse at Pamela and Jason’s sweet, candid relationship. Witnessing a still-alive, cute-as-a-button Jason is a huge change in itself, helping Crystal Lake humanize the antagonists and establish its purpose as a Voorhees family origin story. 

Crystal Lake naturally raises the question: Is this necessary? Are Pamela and Jason better off as bitter and isolated villains, wielding whatever weapon they find to hurt anyone who crosses their paths? The show doesn’t paint them just as vengeance-fueled serial killers; it demands empathy for them by depicting how Pamela fought against dark, corrupt institutional forces before moving to Crystal Lake for a fresh start. But even in this New Jersey town, they’re outcasts. A disfigured Jason gets bullied, while Pam’s only mission is to protect her son. She’s shattered when, while working at the camp as a chef, she witnesses her kid sink to the bottom of the lake. Nine months later, her sorrow gradually morphs into homicidal rage when the camp reopens against her wishes. No one listens to her pleas that Jason might still be out there because his body was never found.