As a slasher series, Friday the 13th is like a chainsaw that took three tugs on the cord to fully fire up.
Like Scream famously points out, Jason Voorhees, the unstoppable killing machine that the franchise turned into a horror icon, isn’t even the killer in original 1980 film. It’s his mother, Pamela Voorhees. Even though Victor Miller’s unevenly written script doesn’t bother introducing this character before the big reveal, the gleefully deranged performance of actor Betsy Palmer ensures Pamela’s place in horror history.
After we watch a gaggle of camp counselors engage in fairly wholesome sexual activity (strip Monopoly! oh no!) and get slaughtered one by one by an unseen assailant, we learn that Pamela has gone insane and is out to avenge her son’s death from drowning at Camp Crystal Lake decades earlier. The culprits were a couple of neglectful, sexually active teenage camp counselors whom she killed a year after the incident; now, to Pamela, the only good camp counselor is a dead one. No lumbering behemoth in a hockey mask here, just a middle-aged lady with a haircut and sweater that scream “church bake sale,” slaughtering teenagers for “making love while that boy drowned!”
Only in Part 2 does Jason himself, who survived his apparent drowning and has lived in the woods as a feral scavenger ever since, begin his own killing spree. Taking the same zero-tolerance approach to camp counselors as his mother, whose death he’s now out to avenge, he is defeated by yet another sexually active camp counselor, who smartly uses his fixation on his mother to escape certain death.
By Part III, Jason’s a lumbering behemoth with super-strength, seemingly just killing anyone unlucky enough to be near Crystal Lake, where he, uh, didn’t drown. It’s here he gets his trademark hockey mask, grabs his trusty machete, and becomes the monster the series is famous for. It’s also here where the series gets incredibly dumb: toilet humor, central-casting hippies and “punks” as victims, and the worst 3D effects you’ve ever seen. By the time he literally rises from the dead in the fourth film, infamously subtitled The Final Chapter, he might as well be Godzilla, if Godzilla movies had gratuitous nudity and special gore effects by Tom Savini.
Sleazy, silly, and creatively disjointed as they are, though, there’s an arc formed by these initial Fridays — the story of a disabled and bullied boy, a mother driven mad by grief, and an improbable tale of survival that turned the boy into a monster like his mother before him. The heart of it all is an incredible scene at the end of Part 2, in which the film’s “final girl” (Amy Steel) finds Jason’s macabre shrine to his mother (complete with her severed head), puts on her trademark blue sweater, and pretends to be her, cooing at the crazed killer to “come to mommy.” The scene is such a psychosexual live wire, so brilliantly acted by Steel and Palmer, that it feels like it’s from a different, better series.
Wisely, it’s on this powerful, ultimately lethal relationship between mother and child that Peacock’s Crystal Lake focuses. This prequel/reboot hybrid from creator-writer Brad Caleb Kane, co-showrunner of the excellent, similar It: Welcome to Derry, launches with an entire episode about a mother losing her vulnerable, beloved son before her eyes. It actually takes the emotional stakes of the films’ premise seriously, even as it plants seeds for some of the franchise’s most outlandish elements — and, arguably, gets even more out-there than they did by the end.
The year is 1972, and the brilliant Linda Cardellini stars as Pamela, a single mom who works as a cook at Camp Crystal Lake so she can support herself and her son, Jason (Callum Vinson). Jason suffers from an unspecified disability; he has an irregularly shaped cranium, no hair, a surgically repaired cleft palate, headaches, and grand mal seizures.
The hard part for them both is that he’s otherwise a “normal” kid, who’s suffering from the whispers and stares of the other children even worse than he is from his health problems. Reluctantly getting out of bed for another day at camp — he attends it so his mother can keep an eye out for seizures while she works, giving him a mama’s boy reputation that only makes matters worse — Jason asks a truly heartbreaking question: “Mommy, why am I like this?” Of course, Pamela has no answer. (Or does she?)
What follows is as tough to watch as you’d expect. Out for a swim, where he’s targeted by bullies, he’s defended by Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), the only kid who’s friendly to him. When they chuck a volleyball at his head, she throws it past the roped-off swimming area deep into the lake. While supervising counselor, Claudette (Danielle Kotch), stops for a quick fuck in the boathouse with her boyfriend Barry (Phoenix Parnevik) before returning to the beach, and while Grace spies on them, half horrified and half fascinated, Jason tries swimming out to retrieve the ball so his friend won’t get in trouble.
His screams for help when he can no longer swim send the whole camp running, and peel Pamela away from Ralph (Nic Cordileone), a Vietnam vet with severe PTSD who keeps wandering onto camp property. She runs full tilt toward the water and dives in fully clothed to rescue her boy, but it’s too late. Before long, she can no longer see him. A freeze frame on her screaming face zooms into her gaping mouth, then crash cuts to the series’ familiar title sequence. Director Michael Lennox deftly takes a powerful moment and tilts it right over into the bizarre.
Nine months after Jason’s death, the same amount of time a pregnancy lasts, Pamela becomes a killer for the first time. But the victims are not who you’d expect. Boy howdy, they really are not who you’d expect at all.
Ever since the incident, we learn, Pamela has kept coming back to Camp Crystal Lake, standing on the dock, staring out at the water, looking for her son. She’s convinced he, or his body, is still there somewhere, and that any activity in the water will somehow “disturb” the…crime scene? Resting place? I’m not sure even Pamela knows. She just wants her son back.
Her behavior puts her on the radar, and in the good graces of, the local police chief, Levon Brooks (Will Catlett). A handsome (Black) man, he’s clearly taken a shine to the lonely (white) woman. His outspoken journalist/activist sister Briana (Devin Kessler) takes great pleasure in pointing this obvious fact out to him when she’s not blasting Funkdadelic from his sound system.
For her part, Pamela seems to like Levon too, and he even persuades her to come to the big Founder’s Day fair in their small New Jersey town, actually putting a smile on her face. The townsfolk, too, all seem sincere in their gestures of friendship, rather than condescending or phony…or I guess it’s possible they just endeared themselves to me while they all freaked out hornily about a piss play scene in a Harold Robbins book one of them was reading at the diner. Salt of the earth!
But the scene is just too much for her. There are kids playing in the water, fireworks going off, well-wishers talking to her, Grace waving to her meekly, Ralph talking about how the lake’s cold water sinks and preserves corpses, Barry and Claudette in hideous matching shirts are talking about putting on some kind of tribute concert or something with over-the-top enthusiasm to mask their guilt. Finally Pamela snaps and runs into the water, screaming at the kids that it’s not safe. Furious with everyone for carrying on like nothing happened, furious with Levon for bringing her there to see it, she returns home.
Here’s where it gets…different.
Two hulking state detectives are waiting for her there, saying they think they’ve discovered Jason’s body five miles down river from where he disappeared. But when Pamela clocks that something is off with these guys and locks herself in the bathroom, they burst in after her, wielding a syringe. She kills one with a pair of scissors through sheer dumb luck.
“I’m not going back,” she says. Sorry, going where?
The other guy decks her and prepares to knock her out with a new syringe, giving her time to grab, that’s right, a goddamn machete, from a camping equipment set she’d bought to Jason’s delight. (Apparently the boy, who hated his life, knows how to survive in the wild. “These woods are mine!” he proclaims in her flashback, holding the machete aloft. Hmm.)
Pamela then chops the guy’s fucking face off, right there on camera. She buries the machete in his skull, seemingly killing him. She pulls it out, causing him to gush blood all over her floor. She wraps his head in a produce bag and seals it with duct tape, causing it to fill up like a water balloon. It’s all brutal and blackly hilarious.
Pamela manages to get Levon, who shows up at the door to make sure she’s okay after the incident at the lake, go away without coming inside and discovering the two corpses…sorry, make that one corpse. The second guy is still alive, and he tackles her. The blood bag bursts, pouring a river of gore all over her face, before he finally keels over and dies. She pounds his face into oblivion with her fists, leading us to where we first see her in the episode’s cold open: covered in blood, a human tooth embedded in her knuckle, staring into the bathroom mirror and asking herself “What did you do?”
But the real question may be what was done to her. Early in the episode, there’s an oddly prominent TV commercial for a company called Bellflower. When the second goon is filling his needle, he calls her “Mrs. Whittering,” says he found her through news reports about her deformed son’s death, and asks what the townsfolk would think of her and her boy if they knew “what you really are.” She finds a note on the newspaper article that tipped them off reading “ARGONAUT?”, leading her to picture a door in a medical or scientific facility with an Argonaut logo on it. She calls someone named Laura and says “They found me.”
Were they experimented on? Are Jason Voorhees’s superpowers getting an gotdang origin story?
The episode ends on a marvelously over-the-top scene in which Pamela somehow wraps up and lugs the two enormous men’s corpses into a bear’s den after covering them with a mix of honey, tuna, and blueberries. (I find this very funny for some reason.) The bear comes out of its den unexpectedly, stares her right in the face as she doesn’t make a move…and eats the bodies just like it’s supposed to. The Founder’s Day fireworks go off in the distance as she hallucinates holding Jason’s hand. Yes, it’s all coming together for Pamela Voorhees.
The Argonaut of it all (Jason and the Argonauts, get it?) is obviously this episode’s big contribution to the mythos. Other than shifting the timeframe forward a decade or two, the way the It films did, this is the one part of the story that isn’t a smartly done remix of ideas from the first few movies. (There are allusions galore, too, from the camp’s distinctive archery targets to an headfake toward the first movie’s unpleasant beheading of a live snake on camera.)
Kane, who shares credit for the story with Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller, pulled a similar maneuver on Welcome to Derry, introducing a military aspect to the decades-long mystery of Pennywise the Clown. To me it felt very Stephen King, very The Stand or The Mist, but as an aspect of the It story I can understand why it’s not for everyone. The same holds true here. Maybe it’s more fun for Jason to be the invincible Superman of slashers just ’cuz. It’s not like the filmmakers back then particularly cared. But other than Part 2, there’s not a great deal of any kind of care evident in either the scripts or on the screen in the Fridays I’ve seen; I’m admittedly not a big slasher guy, but by almost all accounts Jason is a better monster than the movies he starred in deserved.
Kane and Cardellini appear to be taking the Andor approach: What if we took it all this stuff seriously? What if they’d known Jason would wind up a hockey-masked terminator when they started making the first movie? What would his and Pamela’s lives have to have been like to make that possible? What would turn this previously harmless pair of people into slashers? With a talent as ferocious as Cardellini and a writer as mean as Kane taking point, I’m excited to find out the answers.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.