Peacock and A24’s brand new Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, is built on the narrative foundation of taking things back to the very beginning. The story unfolds in the early ‘70s, nearly a decade prior to the events of Sean S. Cunningham’s original Friday the 13th film in 1980. But notably, the very first onscreen kill in the entire eight-episode season takes things even further back than that.
In fact, it takes things all the way back to 1960, overtly referencing a film that played a key role in the origin of the original conceit for that first film; Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Friday the 13th’s inspiration didn’t only come from Halloween
A very popular talking point these days when it comes to the Friday the 13th series is the way in which it’s derivative of John Carpenter’s Halloween, and this is absolutely true. Screenwriter Victor Miller, who penned the first Friday the 13th movie, has admitted as much.
Cunningham saw how much money a low-budget slasher like Halloween could make if positioned correctly within the market, and quickly raced to claim the next spookiest holiday he could for himself.
However, to stop there is to short the true lineage of slasher films, because Halloween was far from the first. Movies like Bob Clark’s Black Christmas and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre had come out a few years prior, and even further back, films like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho had played an integral role in laying the groundwork for what was to come.
Carpenter himself was acutely aware of this, paying homage to Psycho in multiple ways in the original Halloween, between casting that film’s lead actress’ (Janet Leigh) daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis) and naming Donald Pleasance’s ever-enduring Dr. Loomis after one of the main characters in Hitchcock’s film.
Pamela’s Psycho moment
But the original Friday the 13th took things even a step further, with the ultimate reveal of the killer being Pamela Voorhees serving as an inversion on the twist from Psycho. Whereas Hitchcock’s film was about a boy killing after the death of his mother, Friday the 13th was about a mother killing after the death of her son. And now, in returning to the narrative roots of the franchise, Crystal Lake has gone to great lengths to foreground this connection with its first kill.
I don’t feel like I need to explain what the shower scene from Psycho is, but I will just in case: it features Marion Crane (the aforementioned Janet Leigh) taking a shower in her room in the Bates Motel, when a figure appears behind her, rips open the shower curtain, and stabs her numerous times with a butcher knife. This results in Marion dying as blood swirls down the drain and the shower curtain is ripped off of its hinges. In Crystal Lake, Pamela Voorhees (now played by Linda Cardellini) gets her first kill in a bathroom, in a fashion that is deliberately reminiscent of this.
When a mysterious intruder lashes out at her in episode 1, Pamela swipes at him with a pair of scissors, resulting in him stumbling backwards into her shower tub. She continues to slash at him with the scissors, resulting in blood swirling and in the intruder grasping at the shower curtain, causing it to collapse, in a manner deliberately stylized like Psycho.
It’s a great allusion to one of original proto-slashers that really kick-started this whole genre, and whose mother-son dynamics played a critical role in giving the Friday the 13th franchise some of its most interesting material, all of which gets to take center stage in Crystal Lake.
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