After leaking online over the weekend, the first full trailer for Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, has been officially released along with a new poster.
The trailer introduces Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), who witnesses her badly deformed son Jason drowning (or appearing to drown) and sets out to exact bloody revenge on the teens who were supposed to be watching him.
We had been led to believe that Pamela would be handling the killing duties alone, but this teaser features a quick glimpse of what looks a lot like "Sackhead" Jason (the character didn't actually don the iconic hockey mask until Friday the 13th Part 3) running through the forest.
That line about "what the good people of Crystal Lake would say if they knew who you and Jason really were" and the shot of the yellow door have led to speculation that Jason may turn out to be some kind of failed Government super-weapon. Jason is traditionally depicted as a supernatural "zombie," but the expanded universe leans into genetic experimentation as an explanation for his apparent inability to be killed.
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."
Chucky and Long Bright River star Callum Vinson will play Jason as a child, and 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."