Crystal Lake

Reviewed by Fraser · 11 min read · Rated November 2026

Crystal Lake was a really interesting show for me, and I’ll put my cards on the table right away: I really, really enjoyed this one. It’s an eight-episode prequel series to Friday the 13th, made by A24 for Peacock, and it tells the story of Pamela Voorhees, the mother of Jason, in the year after her son’s apparent drowning at Camp Crystal Lake. All eight episodes dropped at once on October 15 in America, and if you’re in Australia like me, it landed on Stan the very next day. Each episode sits just under the hour mark, so you’re looking at around six and a half hours all up, and I can tell you now, it earns that time.

The Long Road to Crystal Lake

There’s some background worth knowing before I get into what I thought, because the road to this show actually existing is a story in itself. The original Friday the 13th came out in 1980, directed by Sean S. Cunningham and written by Victor Miller, and the big twist of that film, which I don’t think counts as a secret 46 years later, was that the killer wasn’t Jason at all. It was his mother, Pamela Voorhees, the camp cook, played by Betsy Palmer, taking revenge on the counsellors she blamed for her son drowning. From there it grew into 12 films, the last one being the 2009 reboot, which means it’s been about 17 years since we’ve had anything new out of Crystal Lake. And people have been trying to make this show for a very long time. Sean Cunningham was talking about a Friday the 13th television series as far back as 2003. The CW had one in development in 2015 and passed on it. This version was first announced in 2022 with Bryan Fuller attached as showrunner, the man behind Hannibal, which if you’ve never seen it is still one of the best horror shows ever put on television, so that was an exciting name. Fuller ended up leaving in 2024 when A24 decided to take things in a different direction, and that’s when Brad Caleb Kane came in. And here’s the thing about Kane: he’s coming straight off It: Welcome to Derry, so he has literally just done this exact job. Taking a massive horror film franchise, going backwards in the timeline, and turning it into a prequel series. He knows this assignment inside and out, and you can feel that confidence all over Crystal Lake.

A couple of other details from the production that I loved. Victor Miller, the man who wrote the original film and created these characters, is an executive producer on this series, so the creator’s fingerprints are actually on it. They shot it in New Jersey through the back half of 2025, and they went back to Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Blairstown, the same real camp they used in the original 1980 film. So that lake, those cabins, that’s not a studio recreation. That is the actual place. And the title sequence has original music from Harry Manfredini, the composer from the films. Those are the kinds of touches that tell you the people making this actually care about where it came from.

Now I should say up front how I came into this one, because I think it matters. I watched the original movie many years ago, and that was about it. I never went through the rest of what is a very, very large franchise, so I came into Crystal Lake a little bit like a newbie. I didn’t know too much of the deeper backstory, and after doing a bit of research afterwards I know a lot of it has been touched on across the movies over the years. But here’s the good news: it was still very good coming in cold. If you’re sitting there thinking you need to have watched 12 Friday the 13th films to follow this, you don’t. One viewing of the original, or honestly even just a passing knowledge of who Jason Voorhees is, and you’re set. The show does the work for you.

A Year of Grief at the Lake

The first episode opens with Pam and Jason at the camp. Jason’s in the water, and it’s very, very much the same sort of setup as the movie: Jason is presumed drowned. One difference is the show moves events to the early ’70s rather than the late ’50s like the film, but the bones are the same. And Pam doesn’t, or cannot, accept that this is real. His remains have never been recovered, so she keeps going back to Camp Crystal to stand by the water and see if she can find her son. Then the show jumps forward a year, and Pam is a lot more unstable, still convinced, somewhere deep down, that Jason may be out there. From that point a few threads start weaving together. The town’s Founder’s Day is approaching. The local police chief, Levon Brooks, played by William Catlett, is one of the few people in town genuinely on Pam’s side. He’s a bit of an outsider there himself, and the two of them start seeing each other. Then a couple of strangers show up in town looking for Pam and digging into her past, and that’s where you start to realise this story comes from a much deeper cut, a mystery tied to something Jason and his mother went through well before they ever arrived at Crystal Lake. Meanwhile, bodies are turning up around the lake. Some of the townspeople convince themselves it’s a bear and head off on a bear hunt against Levon’s orders, which goes about as well as you’d expect. And Levon’s sister Briana, a journalist played by Devin Kessler, starts digging into the deaths and finds there’s a lot more going on than anyone thought.

There’s also a lovely, unsettling thread with a girl named Grace, played by Gwendolyn Sundstrom, who was Jason’s friend. Pam becomes fiercely protective of her, especially once she suspects Grace is being mistreated at home by her mother, Valerie, and watching Pam channel all that unresolved maternal grief into another child is some of the most quietly devastating material in the show. Young Jason himself is played by Callum Vinson in the flashbacks, and he’s great. And if you do know the original film, there are plenty of familiar faces worked in. Crazy Ralph is here, played by Nick Cordileone. So are Barry and Claudette, the two counsellors from the very opening of the 1980 movie. And the Christy family are getting ready to reopen the camp, which is exactly where the original film picks up. The show is walking you right to the doorstep of that movie, piece by piece, and as someone who only knows the original, I found that incredibly satisfying.

Cardellini, the Sirk Episode, and Why It Works

But look, let’s talk about the reason to watch this show, because it’s Linda Cardellini. A lot of people will know her from Freaks and Geeks, or the Scooby-Doo movies, or more recently Dead to Me, and this is a very different role for her. Pam Voorhees is a woman being hollowed out by grief in real time, and Cardellini plays every stage of it: the denial, the fragile attempts at normalcy, the suspicion, and eventually something much darker. There’s a stretch of the season where Pam is trying to move forward through these small, almost heartbreaking gestures. She attends a self-help seminar. She spends time with townsfolk. She tries to be a person again. And the whole time you can see something underneath the surface that isn’t healing, it’s hardening. Because the show has an impossible job here. We all know where Pam ends up. We’ve known since 1980. The task isn’t surprise, it’s transformation: taking Betsy Palmer’s sweater-wearing nightmare from the original film and building a full human being who could plausibly become her. Cardellini absolutely pulls it off. If you only know her from the comedic stuff, Dead to Me was the warning shot that she could do grief and menace in the same breath, and Crystal Lake is the full version of that. It’s one of my favourite performances of the year on television, full stop.

Now, on the slasher side of things, because this is still a slasher, and it delivers. As we know from the movie, Pam is the one doing the vengeance killing in the original, but in this show it’s more of a mix, and I was surprised by how they handled it. A lot of Pam’s violence early on reads as self-defence, with a couple of moments that tip into something more vengeful, and there’s a strong suggestion that someone else is doing a lot of the actual setup. I won’t go deeper into the details than that, because it’s much better discovered on screen. What I will say is that when the show goes for a set piece, it goes. There’s a sequence at a place called the Bronco Beef Pit that is one of the best staged horror scenes I’ve watched all year: tense, nasty, and shot with real patience. The show is happy to be a slow-burn small-town mystery for long stretches, and then it reminds you, suddenly and violently, exactly what franchise you’re in.

Where it all pays off is the deep dive the show takes in episodes 7 and 8, and specifically episode 7. That episode is basically one big flashback, and here’s the swing: it’s shot in the style of the old Douglas Sirk melodramas from the ’50s. Those lush, saturated, too-perfect domestic dramas like All That Heaven Allows, where the beautiful surface is hiding rot underneath. That’s the visual language they use to go back into Pam’s life before Crystal Lake, her marriage to Elias Wittering, played by Hamish Linklater, and what happened to Jason as a younger child. And if you want some connective tissue, Linklater is the actor who gave that extraordinary performance as the priest in Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan’s series, which remains one of the best horror shows of the last decade, so putting him in this episode is perfect casting. This is where the show reveals its biggest new idea. Jason, as a child, was put through a scientific program called Project Argonaut, run by a company called Bellflower Chemical, where Elias works. The idea behind it is building a human being who can survive the nuclear age, and the name comes from Jason and the Argonauts. Without giving away too much, this is the show’s explanation for why Jason is so hard to kill, and why he could go into that lake and never really die. Now, the films took their own stabs at that question over the years. A lightning bolt brings him back in the sixth movie. Jason Goes to Hell, back in 1993, put it down to a spell from Pam. But Project Argonaut is brand new to this show, and I think it’s great that they actually built a proper reason into the mythology instead of just shrugging at it.

A word on A24 here too, because I went in wondering whether this was their first television show, and it turns out they’ve been making TV for over a decade: Euphoria, Beef, Ramy, The Curse. But this is a different kind of show for them. A big franchise slasher prequel is not the usual A24 television play, and they did a really good job with it. It has that A24 care in the craft, the Sirk episode alone proves that, but it never forgets to be entertaining. And here’s a fun flow-on effect I’ve noticed. Even allowing for the fact that we’re heading into Halloween anyway, on a lot of the streaming apps that carry any of the Friday the 13th movies, those films are trending right now. Which tells me people are watching Crystal Lake and then going back to discover the older movies, and honestly, that’s the dream outcome for a prequel like this. It doesn’t just serve existing fans. It creates new ones. I’m proof of that, because I’m now genuinely tempted to go back and work through the franchise I skipped. As for the future, there’s been no official word yet on a second season, but the finale certainly sets things up for one, and I hope we get it.

So, final thoughts. Crystal Lake is a really good slasher television show with a proper deep cut to it. It respects the 1980 original, same camp, same composer, the original writer on board, while adding something new and substantial to the mythology. Linda Cardellini is the reason to watch, episodes 7 and 8 are where it all pays off, and if you like suspenseful, old-school slashers with patience and craft behind them, this is one to put on your list. You don’t need the franchise homework. You just need six and a half hours and a tolerance for dread.

And of course, that’s just how Crystal Lake landed for me. Entertainment is subjective. Maybe slow-burn grief with your slasher isn’t your thing, and what works for me may not work for you, and that’s completely okay. But for my money, Pam Voorhees standing at the edge of that lake is the image of the television year, and I’ll be first in line if they make a season 2.