Slashers operate best when things are kept simple and straightforward. The average slasher film is going to clock in close to 90 minutes long and have a fairly standard plot, in which a group of innocent bystanders is put squarely in the path of some deranged lunatic with a sharp object and a penchant for murder.
Conversely, prestige television is kind of the opposite: it’s a medium in which complexity is practically essential to success. The most acclaimed TV shows of the past several decades have all been ones with ensembles of characters who go through meaningful changes over the course of their respective series’.
So how does one go about marrying these two things and creating a successful season of prestige slasher television? Well, that’s very much the question at the forefront of multiple streamers’ minds right now.
The newly released Crystal Lake, a prequel series to Friday the 13th, was recently released on Peacock but has been met with a pretty divisive response from fans and critics alike. There were rumors Prime Video or Miramax was attempting to gear up a prestige TV take on Halloween. It's unclear where that series is now. Other rumors suggest the project is dead, but it begs the question: what can Halloween learn from Crystal Lake?
Baked into that question is the need to identify what works and what doesn’t about Crystal Lake. One of the biggest pitfalls that the Friday the 13th prequel series falls into is actually directly related to the central conundrum at the heart of this whole kind of adaptation: it convolutes and muddies that which was most effective at its simplest.
In the early Friday the 13th movies, the relationship between Pamela Voorhees and her son Jason is laid out pretty cleanly; Jason was a “special boy” who drowned at camp when the counselors were off having sex and not paying proper attention to him. Pamela is enraged by this and exacts her revenge by killing those counselors and anyone else who tries to start Camp Crystal Lake up again. That is, until she is foiled by a final girl counselor, in the events of the original film, who decapitates her.
Shortly thereafter, it’s revealed that Jason didn’t actually drown but had been alive as a savage-of-sorts out in the woods and witnessed his mother’s murder. Thus, he takes up killing to avenge her, and the rest is horror movie history.
But in Crystal Lake, this fairly simple A-to-B-to-C plotting is needlessly complicated in a bunch of different ways. It gives the series a lot more characters and ground to cover, filling out its runtime and episode quota but actively detracting from the emotion at the heart of it all in the process.
Audiences don’t really get to see Pamela grieve her son, because according to Crystal Lake, she secretly knew that he wasn’t dead because his father had injected him with cockroach DNA, which made him nigh invincible. This correlates directly to another of the show’s biggest weaknesses; feeling the need to over-explain every iota of material.
By rooting itself so squarely in the “origins” of this franchise and characters, Crystal Lake is attempting to explain away decades of creative choices in befuddling fashion, all while feeling shackled to the pre-existing materials in an unflattering way.
A Halloween TV series can't simply be a prequel
It’s a worst-case scenario, and it is the kind of thing a Halloween show should avoid like the plague. The last thing audiences need is a prequel Halloween series about Michael Myers’ childhood.
For one, that’s already been done in Rob Zombie’s remake, to a certain extent. But furthermore, that’s not what makes Halloween interesting; what makes Halloween interesting is bringing in great suspense-driven filmmakers and letting them go hog-wild with a tale of terror.
The original 1978 film hasn’t endured through the decades because people are enamored with the mythos of Michael Myers. If that were the case, latter-day sequels like Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers would be first in everyone’s queue. Rather, what made that original film so iconic was John Carpenter’s craftsmanship, and the construction of the horror itself.
Given that the Halloween franchise has a rich history of going with off-the-beaten-path choices and embracing seasonal ambiance whenever possible, I would honestly love for a Halloween series to not rest solely on the shoulders of Michael Myers.
He was, after all, thrown into a literal meat grinder in his last onscreen appearance, so it would be nice to give him a rest. But embracing a more diversified anthology-style approach could result in a series that uses the strengths of prestige TV as a medium to the project’s advantage, rather than stubbornly attempting to fit the square peg of a simple slasher story into this round hole. Here’s hoping the end result is something more inspired than Crystal Lake.
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