October seemed to be all about horror adaptations made for television and/or streaming. Early in October, Carrie was the talk of the town, and already the following week, Crystal Lake moved into the spotlight. Although I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to, I ended up liking both shows quite a bit. They both manage to breathe new life into the worlds of the stories, but whereas Carrie made a modern retelling of the classic story, Brad Caleb Kane’s Crystal Lake is designed as a kind of prequel to the original film, meant to give us a new understanding of Jason Voorhees’ mother, Pamela Voorhees, a key character from the original Friday the 13th, whose involvement in that film is a famous trivia question. Kane’s series, released on Peacock in the US (but on HBO Max in my region), isn’t a safe one; it boldly reframes our understanding of the iconic monster and mother who raised him.
Crystal Lake follows Pamela Voorhees (played by Linda Cardellini), the single mother of young Jason (played by Callum Vinson), a boy with a facial deformity and who is prone to seizures. As the series kicks off, we witness Pamela working as a cook at Camp Crystal Lake, where her son is often the victim of bullying. As the legend goes, while two camp counselors have sneaked off to have sex, Jason gets in trouble at the camp lake; he, frighteningly, disappears beneath the water, likely drowns, and is never found again. Deeply traumatized and struck with grief, Pamela holds onto the hope that her son, or his body, can be found, and she still keeps watch over the lake. When two men from her mysterious past show up at her door, she decides that violence is her only answer. However, this moment sets in motion events that will lead to the camp and the woods nearby getting a certain reputation.
Kane, who is also a showrunner on It: Welcome to Derry, doesn’t quite find as much success with Pamela and Jason as he did with Pennywise, the dancing clown, but the season does take some big swings regarding both Pamela and Jason’s origin. These have undoubtedly already split opinion in the fanbase, but I must admit that I dug the fact that Kane and his team took it upon themselves to explain why Jason is the way he is and that they gave us something to chew on beyond the simple motivation that Pamela has based on the original film. There’s a lot more to it here, and the penultimate episode of the season fleshes it out relatively well. That episode is a much better period-setting style execution than the rest of the show, quite frankly, as the rest of the season’s camp quests sometimes feel unconvincing.
In my review notes, I was perhaps especially harsh on the subplot involving the group of hippies that stay in or around Camp Crystal Lake. The performances and the writing never felt period-appropriate, to me, and instead felt like dress-up or unconvincing caricatures. To be fair, the franchise itself is not exactly known for high-quality writing or character depth, so perhaps it was wrong of me to hold it to a standard that the franchise only very rarely hits. Though perhaps my disappointment in that regard had something to do with just how impressed I was with Welcome to Derry. In Crystal Lake, certain episodes are quite dull, and the show sometimes struggles to come to life, even though it does eventually get there. I also thought the first episode to be quite clumsy. Although I enjoyed the episode (and largely enjoyed the show), the opening episode is structured in such a way that it feels like the showrunners — or the production company, perhaps — were worried viewers would switch it off if they didn’t get to see something disturbing immediately.
Although the writing isn’t always up to snuff, some performers stand out positively. Chief among them, of course, is Linda Cardellini. Cardellini elevates every single scene she is in, and her portrayal of Pamela is one that you find yourself really invested in. The show would not work without her, and the various B-plots would suffer quite a bit if the show didn’t have William Catlett at its disposal. Catlett is, other than Pamela, the only townsperson who feels like a real person, and this is largely due to his sympathetic performance. I also thought Callum Vinson did a really solid job as the primary actor playing Jason Voorhees. He doesn’t get a lot of scenes, but he adds exactly what is needed to them. The final thing that helped to make this a surprisingly entertaining show, for me, was the fact that the show has some really effective slasher sequences. Whenever Cardellini has to throw herself into her character’s violent deeds, the show is willing and able to make it look gross, in a way that suggests a lot of thought was put into it.
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
