Ah, prequels. If the windows into the early lives of Michael Myers, Leatherface and those pesky door-rapping kids in The Strangers have shown us anything, it’s that our monsters are best left unmasked. To feel for their formative experiences is to divest them of menace. And yet this eight-part series doubles down by showing us how both Jason Voorhees (Callum Vinson) and his ma-ma-mammy Pamela (Linda Cardellini) — the killer in the original Friday The 13th movie, as Casey so memorably forgets at the start of Scream — reached a point where slaughtering teens was their squad goal.
We already know the salient facts, right? It’s there in the 1980 movie, Pam telling Final Girl Alice (Adrienne King) how little J drowned, unsupervised, as two counsellors got hot and heavy. Well, Crystal Lake both tweaks and builds on that exposition-dump (Pam’s revenge on the shagging couple is restaged beat-for-beat, but with a clever reveal), just as it switches up timelines and alters franchise lore. But that’s nothing to the events of Episode 7, which flashes the action back from the main narrative strand set in 1972 to Jason’s birth in 1960. It’s an out-there origin story, more in line with the early work of both Stephen King and David Cronenberg than the bread-and-butter (meat-and-ketchup?) stalk-’n’-slash offerings of the Friday films. Or, to put it in a modern context, it’s all very Stranger Things.
Linda Cardellini is excellent as Pam
There is, of course, nothing wrong with turning source material inside-out, as Mike Flanagan’s just-dropped Carrie series resoundingly demonstrates. Only here the big swings miss, perhaps reflecting the show’s tortuous production history as showrunner Bryan Fuller departed and It: Welcome To Derry’s Brad Caleb Kane stepped in. So, while it’s fascinating to see Pam withdraw from the community of Crystal Lake and flounder as she’s tentatively romanced by kind-hearted police chief Levon (William Catlett), do we really need Jason’s immortality explained? It’s a good deal more disturbing to simply know that you can hack him repeatedly in the head with his own machete (Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter) or drown him in toxic waste (Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) and his hockey mask will be back in place for a new instalment.
Still, Cardellini, fresh from her Emmy for DTF St. Louis, is excellent as Pam, plumbing shuddersome levels of genuine anguish while maintaining Betsy Palmer’s bonkers energy in the original movie. The kills, though too spaced out, are rightly brutal (though tame now, the Friday movies pushed boundaries in the ’80s). And fans will undoubtedly thrill to the series returning to the New Jersey locations of the original picture, with canoes drifting over the lake, archery targets being set up, killer-POV shots twitching to Henry Manfredini’s ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma title theme, and Jason sporting the burlap-sack fashion choice of Friday The 13th Part 2. It’s enough to save Crystal Lake from being doomed, as fan-favourite ‘Crazy Ralph’, who’s thankfully on show here, would surely put it. Whether you’ll be lobbying for a second season is another thing.