One of the most interesting elements going into Peacock and A24’s new Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, was that audiences were well aware that its central figure was a bit out of her mind.
Played by the incomparable Linda Cardellini in the new series, but originated by Betsy Palmer in the original 1980 Friday the 13th film, Pamela Voorhees is a loving mother who’s got more than few screws loose. When she shows up in the initial film, she seems like a nice enough woman who’s nothing more than a benevolent presence.
However, it doesn’t take long for the movie to reveal her true nature: that her son Jason drowned at Camp Crystal Lake years earlier, and that she’s been ruthlessly murdering anyone attempting to start the camp up again ever since.
As if that wasn’t crazy enough, it’s also revealed that she is something of a schizophrenic, having full-blown conversations with herself as both Jason and Pamela. Thus, the idea of centering an entire season of television on Pamela was always bound to be a fascinating one with the potential to really toy with the idea of an unreliable narrator, and it appears as though Crystal Lake is well and truly leaning into that.
A reference to a memorable Jason Voorhees outfit
At the conclusion of the first episode, though, there’s a sly reference to an iconic Jason Voorhees outfit that could have franchise-altering ramifications.
At the end of the first episode of Crystal Lake, Pamela has unexpectedly been backed into a corner by two suspicious men sent to track her down, has killed them in her home, and is now disposing of their bodies by feeding their corpses to a bear in the woods.
As she does this, fireworks are going off in the distance, to celebrate Crystal Lake Founder’s Day, and the musical score swells into a crescendo. Suddenly, a little hand reaches out and grabs hers; that of her young son, Jason’s. The episode opens with Jason’s drowning, so this moment is a shocker for sure. But then, the subsequent shot is a wide that reveals he isn’t really there, and that Pamela is all by herself.
All of this is a notable glimpse into the mindset of Pamela as a character and her fractured mental state in the aftermath of her son’s alleged drowning. However, perhaps what’s most intriguing about all of this is the outfit that young Jason is wearing in Pamela’s imaginary version of him: his exact outfit from Friday the 13th Part II.
When most people think Jason Voorhees, they think hockey mask, and that’s fair. For most of his lifetime, that has very much been the case. But, Jason didn’t actually don the hockey mask until Friday the 13th Part III. He was barely in the first film, which focused more on Pamela as the killer, and then in Part II, he sported a burlap sack with a blue denim shirt and a pair of jean overalls.
The look as a whole was much more rustic than Jason would ever appear again, and yet, Crystal Lake shows Pamela specifically envisioning her young son in this get-up, just minus the burlap sack to mask his face.
Sure, this could just be a fun reference, but it could also hint at larger plans to litigate the events of the franchise proper. Both the original Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part II end with dream sequences of one kind or another, calling into question the reality of much of the events from earlier in the films.
Thus, in deliberately blurring the lines between reality and fantasy for its central character, Crystal Lake looks to be playing with this idea in fascinating ways.
You can stream all eight episodes of Crystal Lake on Peacock.
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