Just a few weeks ahead of its premiere on Peacock, the full-length trailer for the upcoming Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, has been released, giving fans a much better look at what the return to the iconic camp is going to look like.
There’s a lot to love about this trailer, from the skillful use of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” as the needle-drop to the vintage 1970s setting to some key teases of the ever-wonderful Linda Cardellini as the central matriarch of the series. But one of the most interesting things about the new Crystal Lake trailer is the way in which it sets the series up to recontextualize the mythos of the franchise and these characters at large.
Sean S. Cunningham’s original 1980 Friday the 13th started out as little more than a low-brow riff on John Carpenter’s Halloween, simply selecting a different spooky holiday to lay claim to. The film was far from great, received mixed reviews at the time, and is still widely regarded as a bit underwhelming. But perhaps the most shocking thing about Friday the 13th was its ultimate killer reveal. At the end of the film, it was revealed that all of the grisly murders that audiences have been witnessing through non-descript POV shots were actually not committed by some run-of-the-mill slasher, but rather by a seemingly defenseless grieving mother, in the form of Pamela Voorhees.
The story goes that Pamela’s handicapped son Jason drowned in the lake when the counselors weren’t paying attention to him. The mother then decides to exact her revenge on the counselors and anyone who attempts to operate the camp, in some distinctly Old Testament fashion.
The shock of this initial reveal in that first movie has actually only intensified in years since, as Friday the 13th Part II infamously replaced Pamela with her now-not-dead adult son, Jason, and inadvertently turned him into one of the most recognizable slasher icons of all time. But in that first film, it is outright stated multiple times that it was Pamela who was responsible for the murders at Camp Crystal Lake, both within the film’s mainline narrative and during its years-earlier prologue. Which is what makes it all the more notable that Crystal Lake’s trailer seems to imply that Jason is both alive after his supposed drowning and that he is at least somewhat responsible for some of the murders that are happening.
The trailer even has a scene where Cardellini as Pamela is sitting bedside next to a survivor of an attack in the hospital, asking them if they saw Jason when they were attacked. This would seem to imply that Jason is not only alive and active within the woods around Camp Crystal Lake during these events, but that he has launched into a vengeance-filled murder scheme all his own, and that his mother is being drawn out to the woods to search for him in response to this.
This is a marked departure from the canon of the films as it currently stands, but it’s certainly something I’m open to seeing explored. For starters, the canon of the Friday the 13th films has always been loose at best, and the central dissonance at the heart of the series has always been the question of if Jason didn’t actually drown (as the sequels suggest), then what was he doing all those years while his mother was murdering people to keep them away from Camp Crystal Lake? In Part II, he’s discovered his mother’s severed head and goes after the sole survivor of his mother’s rampage, but that’s as much connective tissue as has ever been given for that original series, so Crystal Lake seems primed to reinterrogate these elements in a new way.
But also, there’s every chance this is all just delusions inside of Pamela’s head, and that Jason actually isn’t really killing people, but she’s hallucinating it as a kind of dissociative episode to excuse her own role in the murders. By the time Pamela shows up in Friday the 13th, she’s well and truly nuts, having full-blown conversations with herself as both Pamela and Jason (in very Norman Bates style), so this would all be very par for the course.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens for real when the series releases and fans finally get their eyeballs on some fresh Friday the 13th media.
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