Crystal Lake, which arrives on Peacock on October 15, serves as a slightly retconned prequel to slasher classic Friday the 13th, focusing on Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) as a loving, overprotective mother who begins to unravel when her deformed son Jason drowns under the supervision of some camp counselors who are too busy banging in the supply room to watch him.
As any true horror fan knows, it was Jason's mother doing the killing in the original movie, with her seemingly unkillable son taking up the machete in the sequel - and he only donned the iconic hockey mask in Part 3.
It's already been confirmed that Jason won't wear this mask in the first season, but showrunner Brad Caleb Kane confirmed that he will have a mask while speaking to EW.
“There is a mask. It might be a different mask than fans are used to, but it will not be a different mask than fans have seen. We show the origin story of the mask and why it’s there specifically, and it all connects.”
The recent trailer featured a quick glimpse of what looked a lot like "Sackhead" (or Baghead) Jason running through the forest, so it's a pretty safe bet that this is the mask Kane is referring to.
Chucky and Long Bright River star Callum Vinson plays Jason as a sweet, lonely child who returns from the dead (it remains to be seen if the show follows suit in this regard) as a bloodthirsty monster.
“He’s not a killer,” Vinson says of his take on Jason. “He’s just a normal boy and he just wants to fit in with everybody, but since he had this deformation in his head, he got bullied a lot. When I read these scripts, I was honestly really sad. I put myself in the body of Jason to become him. And it was hard, but I really enjoyed playing this character. He’s one of my favorites.”
After spending over 15 years lying dormant at the bottom of a lake because of complicated rights issues tied to the character, the news broke last year that Jason Voorhees was finally set to return to terrorise a new group of teenage camp counsellors.
This take on Pamela Voorhees is described as "a mother who had given up a singing career to raise a special needs child and takes a dark turn when she loses her son."
The cast also includes Nick Cordileone (Warrior), Joy Suprano (Fleishman is in Trouble), Danielle Kotch (Director’s Cut), and Phoenix Parnevik (Bel-Air) as future Voorhees victims Ralph, Rita, Claudette, and Barry.
"In many ways, it's a psychological thriller," showrunner Brad Caleb Kane said in a recent interview. "It's a paranoid '70s thriller. It has all of the DNA of a slasher without quite being a slasher. There are rivers of blood in the show. There are very, I think, ingenious kill sequences and deaths and murders, but it's all done in service of character and theme and place and time."
"[Friday the 13th] out of the paranoid '70s thriller era. It came out of the mistrust-of-institutions era. It came out of the women's lib era, the National Organization for Women era, this consciousness-raising awakening era in America. I wanted to go and play with all of those themes," he added. "[Cardellini is] gonna shock and surprise a lot of people."