Crystal Lake Review

A prequel is a thorny undertaking. First, you need to justify why anyone needs to learn the story of what happened before the seminal (or, really, just popular) story that succeeds this jump into the past. And once you’ve done that, the story you’re telling needs to be good enough to stand up to that sequel series. Learning how Jimmy McGill became Saul Goodman in the Breaking Bad universe was something I didn’t think we needed when it was initially announced as a prequel series, but you know what? I was very much wrong and Better Call Saul managed to hit higher highs than its sequel series. Andor took a film (Rogue One) that I didn’t particularly care for and turned its prequel into a stunning treatise on the horrors of fascism – and made me love that film. So, when I saw that Peacock was providing us with a prequel series to the classic slasher film series Friday the 13th, I was willing to give it a chance. And what a terrible choice that turned out to be.

I should preface this by saying I’ve only ever watched the original Friday the 13th and it was almost certainly at some middle school sleepover a solid 30 years ago, so I’m likely not the target demographic for this series. That being said, there should be enough in a series like this that a lack of deep understanding of the future series of films doesn’t matter all that much. And that’s mostly the case here. About all you need to know is who Jason and Pamela Vorhees are and that they have a long and bloody relationship with the campers and counselors of Camp Crystal Lake, and you should be mostly set. Not that it really matters all that much, since the story being told is so dull and unnecessary that it’s clear the only reason the series got made was that NBC Universal had the IP for those two characters – but not the killer Jason of the films – and wanted to try their hand at a bit of a money grab. Because boy is this show absolutely awful.

The central story is that of Pamela Vorhees (Linda Cardellini, stuck in a thankless role despite giving it her all), a bit of an outcast in the town of Crystal Lake. She works in the kitchen at the local camp, that her son Jason, who suffers from physical deformities and is bullied, attends for free. When tragedy strikes (thanks, in large part, to two camp counselors hooking up in the boat shed rather than watching the water), Pam loses Jason and falls into a deep depression that she can’t get out of. As her past starts to catch up with her – she and Jason came to Crystal Lake after running away from a terrible situation elsewhere – she starts to rely on the local sheriff for support. Oh, and she also seems to have quite the short fuse and some pretty gnarly violent tendencies. Which likely isn’t much of a shock if you’ve seen the first Friday the 13th film.

So, I think it’s pretty clear just from that short description that Crystal Lake fails my two-part test for prequels. At no point in the eight-episode series does the show justify why we need this deep dive into what Pam was like immediately prior to the start of Friday the 13th. In fact, I’d argue, that when it comes to the villains in classic horror movies – especially those like Jason and Pam, whose motivations are pretty darn clear from the jump – the less we know, the better. These aren’t the types of characters where the audience needs to sympathize with them to better understand their murderous actions – they’re pretty cut and dry in the films. We don’t need any more backstory on Michael Myers than what we get in those early Halloween films. We don’t need more than a final speech from the killers in any of the Scream films to explain why they did it. The point of these characters is that they are just that: killers. We learn their motivation, we don’t need to know their life story as well. Nothing in this series made me care any more about Pam or Jason.

Now, for point two, Friday the 13th is not a good movie. It’s not a good series. It’s easily the weakest of the 70s and 80s horror franchises. It’s a guy in a hockey mask with a machete killing people. His whole shtick is that he’s a silent killer who keeps getting stronger and stronger no matter what happens to him. So, the bar for being as good as or better than the sequel wasn’t exactly high here. And, somehow, I found myself even more annoyed with Crystal Lake than I ever was watching Friday the 13th all those years ago. It could be that the series makes us sit through eight episodes where the film was under two hours. But it certainly didn’t help that the plot was a mess throughout, the characters were forgettable and thinly drawn, and the performances were disappointing. Cardellini is a great actress and boy, she’s got nothing to play here. Hell, even an appearance by Hamish Linklater late in the series (fulfilling the requirement that Linklater appear in any and all creepy horror programming on television) can’t turn things around.

If you’re a super fan of Friday the 13th, you might get something out of the series. But for anyone else – this is absolutely not worth your time.

Crystal Lake premieres on Peacock on October 15. All eight episodes were provided for review.