To its credit, “Crystal Lake” is not like a lot of modern TV horror. The “Friday the 13th” prequel series isn’t a remixed remake or a cheap rip-off. It’s not a horror show that’s actually a family drama, or a slapstick comedy, or made by Ryan Murphy. Most pointedly, it’s not trauma horror, where whatever you’re scared of is a metaphor for repressed emotions, or elevated horror, where there’s nothing to be scared of, or even horror as social commentary, where the real killer is the American health care system.
Brad Caleb Kane’s eight-episode first season does invite a little sympathy for the devil, a la Mike Flanagan, but not to the same genre-tilting degree as the showrunner of our latest horror prequel. No, any empathy felt for Pam Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) and her son, Jason (Callum Vinson), stems from natural human compassion. While they may grow up (so to speak) to be mass murderers, they were once just a mother and her child, and it’s only natural to wonder what exactly happened to corrupt them in between.
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To its considerable discredit, however, “Crystal Lake’s” success as a throwback slasher (complete with freeze-frame cuts, screeching orchestral cues, and gobs of gruesome bloodshed) isn’t enough to overcome its failures as a prequel. All those imaginative kills are steadily undermined by a story lacking similar creativity, leading up to a lethal one-two punch of an ending: The penultimate flashback episode answers every question you had from the start, before the perfunctory finale sums everything up without much help from the season’s first six hours.
It’s almost like… wait, let me see if I can do the math: One hour for the origin story, plus one hour for its climactic consequences, equals a two-hour narrative? Two hours… two hours, what usually takes two hours? Maybe… a movie?
Like Jason himself, “Crystal Lake” is malformed and alarming, but it’s also like Jason in that it can be surprising, even charming, in brief, sporadic bursts. The opening sequence, unlike what follows, doesn’t waste any time: Pam is a cook at Camp Crystal Lake. Her son is in attendance and, in accordance with the established lore, he meets a tragic fate during an unsupervised swim, while the teen lifeguards in charge are busy canoodling in a vacant shed.
All this takes place before the title card hits, and from there we jump forward nine months to find a still-tormented Pam struggling to make peace with her new life. Every day, she visits the lake where Jason drowned. The camp closed after the accident, in part because his body was never found, but now it’s prepping to reopen for the upcoming summer. Pam is adrift in memories, but she’s also fixated on feeling — feeling something, anything, even if it’s painful. “He and I, we’re joined at the heart,” she says. “I don’t want to heal. I want to find my son.”
As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people, and Pam hurts a whole lot of people. Some are strangers who accidentally unlock her dormant rage. Some are colleagues who can’t quite understand what she’s going through. One is the local police chief, Levon Brooks (William Catlett), whose crush on Pam blinds him to her suspicious behavior, and some are bad men from her past, who come looking for Pam once word of a single mother with a dead kid starts making the rounds. (Catlett’s gruff but sympathetic cop is a highlight, especially when he’s thrown for a loop — like when his quiet town is inundated with bizarre killings, but also in smaller moments, like when he solves a racist crossword clue.)
The premiere does a fine job teasing Pam Voorhees’ mysterious past, just as Cardellini does an extra fine job convincingly capturing the character’s opposite extremes: forlorn recluse and voracious hedonist. She has ties to an ominous corporation, memories of a locked yellow door, and nightmares about Jason coming back to life. But why? Why is Pam so convinced her son isn’t dead? Or that she’ll see him again even if he was? It all comes out in Episode 7, “Friday…,” the flashback episode that should really be where “Crystal Lake” begins.
Even if you set aside the annoying trend of TV shows that go back to the beginning right as they’re about to end, “Crystal Lake’s” application is galling. Like too many modern mysteries, it tries to root Pam and Jason’s propensity for violence in one self-contained trauma; unavoidable adversity sparks a series of bad decisions that produces the people you meet in “Friday the 13th” (and, when it comes to Jason, its subsequent sequels).
Thankfully, their origin isn’t overly focused on metaphoric readings — popular ’70s tropes are sprinkled in here and there, from Cold War anxiety to Vietnam PTSD and corporate paranoia, but they’re more of a backdrop than an allegory — and the preceding episodes refute any suggestion that Pam is a victim. She’s not misunderstood, she’s not the product of her environment, and she’s not slicing up camp counselors “for the right reasons.” She’s a baddie, and my highest compliment for “Crystal Lake” is that it’s unafraid to let her be very, very bad.
But sticking to a strictly villainous spin on Pam results in a far-too-simple “reveal” of who she is, where she came from, and why she’s living in Crystal Lake. There’s a reason slasher films aren’t sprawling epics; they’re lean and mean, with a rightful emphasis on the latter attribute. They live and die on their creative kills and immersive escapism, while many of the greats contribute an unforgettable twist ending.
Going into “Crystal Lake,” we already know where things end, and it’s difficult to sustain tension-driven escapism over eight hours, especially when it’s obvious which new characters are being introduced just to be slaughtered. Hell, even recurring characters drop off without so much as the courtesy of a sickening demise.
That leaves answering the series’ inciting question to carry a lot of its weight: “Just who is Pam Voorhees?” If you must know, skip to Episode 7. I promise you won’t miss anything essential, nor are the forfeited fun bits worth an additional six hours of your life. But what’s waiting isn’t exactly mind-blowing, and I suspect franchise die-hards will be happier being left to their collective, unlimited imaginations.
Grade: C
“Crystal Lake” premieres Thursday, October 15 on Peacock. All eight episodes will be released at once.