It’s interesting, to this day, how many people still don’t realize Jason Voorhees only appears for a brief second in the original “Friday the 13th” film. Spoiler for a 46-year-old film (and the opening scene of “Scream” and the entire premise of the new “Friday the 13th” prequel series): Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees, is the killer in the first film.
In the 1980 film directed by Sean S. Cunningham, we know Pamela Voorhees blames pretty much everyone at Camp Crystal Lake for the drowning death of her son, Jason Voorhees (we assume you are familiar with his work), and goes on a murderous rampage (which includes a young Kevin Bacon). The new series explores, well, how did it get to this point?
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“Crystal Lake” has been in some sort of development, off and on, for around 23 years. The rights to “Friday the 13th” are mired in an extremely complicated legal situation, with different entities owning different aspects of what Jason Voorhees would become. (For example, Jason doesn’t have his iconic hockey mask until the third installment, and there are legal claims on that creation versus what we see in the first film.)
But “Crystal Lake,” with its ‘70s backdrop, is a long way off from anyone running around with a hockey mask. But! Here we are, finally, with Brad Caleb Kane getting this show made. And, now, coming off her Emmy win for “DTF St. Louis,” Linda Cardellini in the lead role of Pamela Voorhees.
Ahead, Kane and Cardellini share what each wanted from the Pamela Voorhees we see in this series, and why the show added a conspiratorial subplot that didn’t exist in the films. (Oh, and a lot of praise for Don Knotts, who we do see in the series, kind of surprisingly.)
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: When Linda was cast, you didn’t realize you were getting Emmy winner Linda Cardellini.
Brad Caleb Kane: No! But she should have already had an Emmy by the time I cast her for “Crystal Lake.” But I did know that all of her performances are indelible and amazing. She has an effortless likability. One of the things I was thinking when I first reached out to Linda to talk to her about possibly taking on the part was her performance in “Dead to Me,” holding everything that she knows inside and not being able to reveal to a person what she’s done. That element of holding all of that information inside and making us see, without commenting on it, how much it’s paining her and how conflicted she is. That was a real element we needed for our Pamela Voorhees. Somebody who is keeping secrets, but you can see it is eating away inside of her. And transforms into a person that just lets her freak flag fly, joyfully. So I wanted that quality and she does it effortlessly in that show, so that’s why I reached out.
This series was first discussed as far back as 2003.
Kane: I didn’t even know that.
Sean S. Cunningham mentioned he had an idea in development. Over the years, so many people have tried. How did you do it?
Kane: Right place, right time. Right take for the right people.
And I realize this has had a very complicated legal journey.
Kane: Yeah, all that stuff is kind of above my paygrade — all the legal wrangling that went on to sort of pull all the rights together. I think that happened with A24 and Jason Inc. I think there’s another rights holder? And some people have the rights to the mask but not the name. All that stuff was done and dealt with before I came on board and pitched my take. It really was just a function of me seeing they were going to make this thing.
The great Bryan Fuller, who I am a massive fan of, had, I guess, creative differences with some of the people. And he ended up going in a different direction. But they were looking to make it with somebody because they did want to do a Pamela Voorhees prequel and, when I saw that was happening, I reached out because “Friday the 13th Part III,” it was the first “Friday the 13th” I saw in theaters.
That was 1982, right? That was my first one, but I didn’t really get into these until the pandemic. I found them comforting.
Kane: Right. And I remember a full crowd and the manipulation of that crowd and them yelling at the screen. There was a fine layer of marijuana smoke over everybody’s head with the blue beam of the projector cutting through it. It’s all very proustian for me.
And Shelly Finkelstein with his props.
Kane: Yeah, totally! Shelly Finkelstein with his props! That guy is a lawyer now. I think he’s a lawyer for some of the people who were in the various movies. Because the “Friday the 13th” universe is a small family, people reach out from other movies and stuff. And I think he’s actually a lawyer for some of those people. The actors from various movies. He’s made “Friday the 13th” representation a career.
Linda, what’s your prior relationship with “Friday the 13th”?
Linda Cardellini: I mean, I saw the movies when I was a kid. I loved scary movies when I was a kid. I think it made me seem cool, I felt like, to my older brother. I saw other ones in the theaters, but I do remember seeing “Freddy vs. Jason” in the theaters. It was in LA at Universal City Walk and it was packed. And people were screaming at the screen! I was waiting for that movie to come out. They were two icons, two worlds colliding. So I love a Halloween horror night. I mean, less so now, I’m a little bit older, but I really love the thrill and the fun of it.
And I’m a big Halloween lover. Halloween the holiday. So, all that stuff I think is really fun. I mean, you can’t really even think about the date Friday the 13th without seeing the mask in your mind, or wondering about how auspicious that date is. So I think it just worked its way in for a child of the ‘80s — it worked your way into your psyche. The same way you feel scared when you go into a pool and there might be a shark there. [Laughs] Because we saw “Jaws”!
Kane: To your point about finding them comforting during the pandemic, a lot of that has to do with the nostalgia factor of it and that yearning of a simpler time…
Yes, a simpler time when Jason Vorhees would run around and stab people.
Kane: But it’s a simple motive!
It was.
Kane: You step onto the camp grounds and this guy is going to get you. And probably in a very inventive and creative way.
Cardellini: And over the top.
Kane: Totally over the top. And there’s something very comforting about going back to those things of our youth that were simpler than things are now — in our personal lives or the world at large. So, yeah, that is why they are comforting in a lot of ways.
Cardellini: And it not being hyper-realistic, too, that is fun about it. That part of it makes it entertainment to digest.
Are you surprised by how many people don’t realize that Jason basically isn’t even in the first movie?
Kane: That exact thing is what got Drew Berrymore killed at the beginning of Scream. She got that answer wrong! I don’t know, do people not know now that Mrs. Voorhees was the killer in the first movie?
I think the average citizen at large does not know that.
Cardellini: And you think the hockey mask was there all along, too.
Right. Which doesn’t show up until the end of the third one.
Kane: Well, we should educate them. [Laughs] I like to think of myself as an educator.
Linda has a scene where she wraps a guy’s head in a clear plastic bag, who has a head wound, then the bag completely fills with blood and explodes onto your face.
Cardellini: When I read that, I was very excited. Because that’s an inventive way to see this happen. Not realizing, oh, wait a minute, I’ll be covered in that from head to toe.
Kane: Oh, you didn’t realize the reality of it on the ground?
Cardellini: No, but I thought it was so fun and inventive and strange and I love that about parts of the show. We took a week to shoot that sequence. Is it like a 15-minute sequence?
Kane: It’s like a 20-minute sequence.
Cardellini: It’s a 20-minute sequence and there’s not very much talking.
Kane: There’s virtually no talking.
Cardellini: And she’s just being put through it physically. To me, I loved that about it. That it wasn’t dialogue-heavy and that it was really about … ah … that it was cinematic to me. It read cinematic to me and I thought that would be a lot of fun and I hadn’t done anything like that before. After, I think that is such a great tableau for her, looking in the mirror, “What did you do?” And being at that point in her life, it sets you on the road for what you’re about to see. And how does she become that person.
Kane: And all of that stuff is just a function of her trying to survive. None of that is gratuitous, “Oh, let’s show you a whole bunch of blood.” She was trying to survive. She does what she does…
Cardellini: She’s trying to clean it up!
Kane: She’s trying to clean it up and not turn it into this mess and it turns into this thing. It’s the escalating situations of growing absurdity.
And we feel a lot of empathy for Jason in the flashbacks and how he’s treated, I never thought I’d say that sentence.
Kane: I’m one of those people who believes, concretely, that monsters are not born. They are made. There might be some genetic predisposition or some chemical thing that may be going on, then turned on. I wanted to show that monsters like Jason and Pamela were not monsters to begin with. They were formed by certain circumstances and situations and manipulations.
We come to TV for character. We want to spend time with characters. We want to get to know them and we want to empathize with them. And, obviously, Jason and Pamala Voorhees are our main characters in this franchise. So how do you empathize with them? Well, you have to show them as human beings.
There’s a conspiratorial aspect and mystery to this show that isn’t really present in the films…
Kane: We set the show in the ‘70s, because the first movie was 1980…
Right, Pamela Voorhees is watching Don Knotts on TV.
Kane: Don Knotts! Yes! The Don Knotts variety show. I’m a big “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” fan. Legitimately, not ironically.
Not “The Incredible Mr. Limpet”?
Kane: I like “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” but seeing Don Knotts’ voice come out of that fish is not as exciting.
I was big into “The Apple Dumpling Gang.”
Kane: I grew up on that. Well, now we’re just talking Don Knotts…
Cardellini: I love Don Knotts.
Kane: But, if you’re going to set something in the ‘70s, specifically, what was so prominent that decade — the movies that were prominent and the feeling that was in the air. For America, the feeling in the ‘70s that was really prominent was mistrust in institutions. You see that in the movies that are really popular at the time, specifically the Alan Pakula paranoid thrillers trilogy. “Klute,” “The Parallax View,” “All the President’s Men.” Even movies like “Three Days of the Condor.” So it felt like, if we are going to do a show that takes place in the ‘70s, let’s bring that aspect to it. Let’s have Pamela and Jason be on the run from something and have it parallel the things that were going on in America at the time.
There’s been a lot of speculation I’ve seen online, “Oh, is he making Jason a supersoldier?” “Is this a ‘Stranger Things’?” “Is this ‘Jason XI’?” It’s none of that. It’s nothing that’s out of the realm of reality. It’s all stuff that’s based in science and things that were going on at the time. He’s not a genetically engineered anything. That conspiracy that we learn about later in the season comes out of a very specific human instinct that Pamela has, that’s been turned on its head and turned into manipulation and gaslighting and all the things that women and America had to go through at this time in American history.
I’m going to embarrass Linda now, but we had what we had on the page, and I say this legitimately, the show doesn’t work unless you have an actor who approaches this character seriously and with respect. And the spirit of creating a real situation under these imaginary circumstances. And she came to work and she put in the thought behind it…
And in her last show, she singlehandedly brought back the phrase, “No way, Jose.”
Kane: [Laughs] I love that.
Cardellini: [Laughs] I’ll take it!
All eight episodes of “Crystal Lake” start streaming on Peacock on Thursday, October 15.