Brad Caleb Kane is ready to take on the haters. That's a good thing, because his new show, Crystal Lake, is almost guaranteed to be met with criticism from riled-up Friday the 13th fans angry over the changes Kane is making to Jason Voorhees canon in his attempt to give slasher icon Jason and his murderous mother Pamela (Linda Cardellini) a fleshed-out backstory.
For one thing, Crystal Lake reshuffles the original timeline, moving Jason's death up from 1957 to 1971, and then compresses the amount of time between that event and the summer camp slaughter that follows.
"I think the mythology is a little wonky as it is in terms of the timeline," Kane says, somewhat defensively, when I bring up these timeline shifts.
In general, Kane isn't too worried about how Crystal Lake tweaks or outright changes the existing Friday the 13th canon. He calls out our modern obsession with lore as completely missing the point of these movies, which conveniently gives him a lot more freedom to tell whatever story he wants. Still, maybe Kane has a point.
"I bemoan a little bit like this thing that we've gotten into," he says. "I grew up watching these movies in theaters and what they were about was sensation. They're about a collective experience, a cathartic experience, with an audience full of people. It's about taking a ride.
"But somewhere over the last 20 years, watching these slasher movies that had multiple sequels became about collecting and hoarding information. I come to these movies for character, for sensation, for the kills."
Kane isn't wrong. The Friday the 13th continuity has always been murky, at best, and the less time spent trying to apply logic to its timeline the better. That said, there are some very specific reveals in Crystal Lake's seventh episode, in particular, that I want to get into with the showrunner, and that means unpacking both how they interact with the broader Jason Voorhees lore and what they represent on this particular show.
Thankfully, Kane was happy to get into those details with me, but not before delivering one more disclaimer.
"I am the original fan of these movies," he says. "I didn't make these changes out of whole cloth or because I don't have a respect for the franchise. They came from a very specific place."
There are major spoilers for all of Crystal Lake in this article.
After the first trailer for Crystal Lake revealed a mysterious laboratory door labeled “Argonaut,” franchise fans began to speculate that Jason was actually some sort of MKUltra-style government experiment. In response, Kane posted a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mister Freeze on Instagram with the caption: "Everybody Chill!"
The Sept. 14 post went on to shoot down most of those rumors, and suggest a few others instead:
"It’s not the CIA. He’s not a gov’t super soldier or an Eleven. He’s probably just a Chud. Or at worst a Trog. In any case, all will be known Oct. 15. Y’know, they called Copernicus a heretic at first, too. And look how that turned out!"
Turns out, Kane wasn't being entirely honest.
Crystal Lake episode 7 is essentially one extended flashback revealing how Pamela gave birth to Jason, and how he became the subject of a nefarious corporate experiment designed to create humans that could survive a nuclear blast. (This all takes place during the height of the Cold War and the era of mutually assured destruction.) Not only is Jason invulnerable, but physical trauma actually makes him grow larger and stronger at an accelerated rate.
With a wide variety of influences ranging from David Cronenberg and Rosemary's Baby to the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, there's a lot to take in throughout episode 7 — and a lot that may leave audiences with even more questions than before.
The episode opens on a young, pregnant Pamela just as she experiences a miscarriage — or so the doctor tells her. A second opinion, secured by the father (Hamish Linklater) through his sales job at a large conglomerate, reveals that the fetus is still alive, but just barely. So Pamela signs up for an experimental treatment to save the baby, which involves moving from New York to a suburban town in Texas controlled by the company.
Pamela gives birth successfully, years go by, and Jason spends a lot of time undergoing various treatments at the laboratory. Eventually, Pamela discovers the truth and finds her boy chained up in a secret facility. So she murders the doctor and flees from her husband, who has been directly involved in the experiments.
So is Jason a supersoldier? Not exactly, but he's not just a regular kid either. For Kane, the big distinction comes down to one specific detail.
"He's not a science experiment," the showrunner says. "He was a real baby who was holding on for dear life inside Pam."
Jason's new origin story is also deeply personal for Kane.
"Anybody who's ever gone through those fertility issues, which my wife and I have, knows you get to a very desperate place where you're like, 'This is a child and it's probably going to miscarry unless I take something to strengthen the follicles.'"
However, he also adds that this episode is rooted in the real history of the Cold War era.
"These experiments were going on at the time," Kane says. "Whether we're talking about things like thalidomide, or other drugs that companies were working on for very specific purposes that ultimately showed they had other properties that were useful, and so they tilted into corporate and government contracts. It seemed realistic to me that this could happen."
That other Pamela Voorhees twist
The question of why Pamela became a serial killer has always lingered in horror fans' minds, thanks in part to original actor Betsy Palmer's eerie delivery of her infamous line, "Kill her, mommy!" Those three words suggested that either Jason was possessing his mother from beyond the grave, or that her grief had completely pushed her over the edge.
Audiences have debated the question for decades, but Crystal Lake seems to provide the answer. After an incident early in episode 7 where an exhausted Pamela almost drowns her infant son (his miraculous survival is the first hint of his powers), the same doctor treating Jason prescribes Pamela some powerful antidepressants to calm her down.
Later, when Pamela rescues Jason from the lab, the doctor warns her that she's become dependent on those drugs. If she runs away, the withdrawal could permanently damage her brain. She takes the risk, but throughout Crystal Lake, it's clear that Pamela isn't just grieving her son, she's also dealing with a serious mental health disorder.
"Obviously there's the grief aspect of it," Kane says. "That's real, and that plays into the changing of her brain chemistry. But if you know anybody who's been on SSRIs or various other things and goes off cold turkey — it really changes your brain chemistry."
The show never specifies exactly what medication Pamela was taking, but the showrunner notes that the 1960s was a "much more experimental" time in that respect.
"God knows what she was on to keep her stable and quiet and gaslit while they were doing whatever they were doing to her son," he says.
For Kane, these few lines of dialogue are crucial to our entire understanding of Pamela's character, and of Crystal Lake in general.
"We wanted to explain her protectiveness with Jason," he says. "We wanted to explain how the grief could stay with her for as long as it does. And we wanted to explain how her brain chemistry could have changed to the extent that the madness would ultimately fully take hold of her, and she would become the woman that we know from the first movie."
In that sense, Crystal Lake puts an interesting new spin on Pamela Voorhees, though in the process, it arguably undercuts one of the best moments in horror movie history.
"Maybe it's a little too much explanation," Kane says, "but too fucking bad."
Crystal Lake is streaming now on Peacock.