Friday the 13th is proof that a movie need not be a cinematic masterpiece to become a franchise-fueling horror classic.
asserted
movie → become → ?
Sean S. Cunningham’s low-budget 1980 film brought the teen-slasher thrills of Halloween to a summer camp preparing to reopen years after two counselors were murdered there.
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counselors → bring → camp
The attitude it implied toward sex and drugs was as hysterical as any “Just Say No”-era afterschool special.
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it → imply → special
Yet the movie was also viscerally effective, cycling through the sensations of suspense, titillation, and terror so quickly that, for its hormone-addled young audience in particular, it was impossible to look away.
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it → cycle → audience
Say what you will about Friday the 13th; it’s not boring.
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it → say → 13th
So it’s extra disappointing that Crystal Lake, an eight-episode Peacock horror series that reboots the franchise around the mother of victim turned bogeyman Jason Voorhees, is such a slog.
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that → ’ → bogeyman
, it emerges from a development morass involving the departure of original showrunner Bryan Fuller (who had previously reinvented The Silence of the Lambs franchise in his stylish cult crime drama Hannibal) over creative differences with production company A24.
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who → emerge → A24
Brad Caleb Kane, whose credits include quality shows like Lodge 49 and Tokyo Vice along with It: Welcome to Derry, replaced Fuller, who retains a story credit, in 2024.
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who → include → 2024
This might help to explain why the series, premiering Oct. 15, turned out to be such a convoluted, dull, incoherent, ultimately pointless mess.
uncertain
series → help → ?
Whatever the reason, it epitomizes everything wrong with the TV adaptations of horror touchstones that IP-crazed streamers keep churning out.
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streamers → epitomize → that
Jason’s mom, Pamela, is the villain of the original movie, where she’s played by Betsy Palmer, though at that point in the franchise she’s identified only as “Mrs. Voorhees.”
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she → play → Voorhees
The boy’s death by drowning in 1957, due to the negligence of the same horny counselors who would be killed the following year, unhinged his mother—to the extent that, in the film, she carries on both sides of conversations she imagines she’s having with him, in a reverse-Norman-Bates type scenario.
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she → kill → scenario
Mrs. Voorhees enters almost 80% of the way through Friday the 13th and is dead a little over 10 minutes later, her head macheted off in lurid slow motion by final girl Alice (Adrienne King).
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head → enter → Alice
The series’ version of Pam is a single mother in early-’70s Crystal Lake, NJ, the small town where the eponymous camp is located.
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camp → locate → Lake
Played by Linda Cardellini, whose casting as a woman who’s equal parts loving and driven by repressed rage is Crystal Lake’s one stroke of genius, she cooks at the camp and the local school by day and cares for Jason by night.
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she → play → night
Her boy is a sweet preteen who has physical differences (his head is large, bald, and lumpy) and is prone to seizures.
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head → have → seizures
Fiercely protective, she enrolls him in Camp Crystal Lake in order to keep him close by, even though the cruel campers ostracize him.
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campers → enroll → him
But Pam’s helicopter parenting backfires when he disappears in the lake as the two counselors who are supposed to be supervising, Claudette (Danielle Kotch) and Barry (Phoenix Parnevik), sneak off to snog.
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who → backfire → lake
Jason’s only friend, an empathetic fellow outcast named Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), stumbles upon the couple and freezes, transfixed.
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friend → name → couple
By the time Pam realizes something is wrong, Jason has vanished.
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Jason → realize → time
But a body is never found, and so she’s convinced her son isn’t dead.
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son → find → ?
In part because of that apparently irrational belief and in part because she’s hurt to see her neighbors moving on so quickly after the death of a child they treated like a freak, she can’t abide the camp reopening the very next year.
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camp → hurt → freak
This is where the plot gets unwieldy.
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plot → get → ?
A pair of thugs disguised as state troopers arrive to drag Pam back to some dark past that is only hinted at throughout the first six episodes of the season.
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that → disguise → season
She kills them, kicking off a cat-and-mouse homicide investigation led by the local police chief, Levon, a.k.a. Lee (William Catlett), a Black cop whose race underlines his outsider status in a town full of white yokels, and who carries some unspecified baggage from a past stint in Newark.
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who → kill → Newark
A tentative romance takes root between Lee and the woman he doesn’t realize is on a mini murder spree.
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he → take → spree
He also, conveniently, has a newspaper-reporter sister (Devin Kessler) to help him investigate what brought the victims to Crystal Lake.
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what → have → Lake
The series plods forward from there, punctuated by some mild scares and semi-inventive kills, generating lots of clutter but negligible momentum.
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series → plod → clutter
Kane dutifully remixes memorable aspects of the franchise—the snake in the cabin, the sex and drug panic, the trap-door endings.
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Kane → remixe → cabin
The ‘70s setting is exploited for side plots, from the trendy encounter group to which Pam accompanies liberated diner denizen Rita (a fun but underused Joy Suprano) to an itinerant band of Central Casting hippies, that mostly serve as time wasters.
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that → exploit → wasters
Clichés are nested within clichés; a prototypical penultimate flashback episode takes us back to the ’50s, where every nightmare of suburban womanhood is on display.
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nightmare → nest → display
Crystal Lake invokes various themes, some latent in the movies and some not: small-town racism, fear of difference, corporate cruelty, the strain of sexism that underestimates the anger of a woman like Pam at everyone’s peril.
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that → invoke → peril
Yet its engagement with these societal ills rarely goes deeper than the acknowledgment that they exist.
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they → go → acknowledgment
A24 has a reputation for aesthetics, and while this isn’t its most visually inventive work, the retro-VHS flourishes are well done.
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flourishes → have → aesthetics
As she did in Dead to Me, Cardellini makes us feel the love and pain behind Pam’s violence.
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us → do → violence
Grace could’ve been a fascinating character, but she fades away in the final third of the season, before her precociousness and confusion can develop into anything worth exploring.
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precociousness → fade → anything
The most intriguing plot twist happens in the flashback episode, yet it’s no sooner introduced than abandoned.
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it → happen → episode
There’s no context in which Crystal Lake would’ve been satisfying.
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Lake → ’ → which
Like too many horror series (Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, Hemlock Grove), it stretches a feature’s share of plot into a season that feels interminable.
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that → go → season
And like too many horror series adapted movie franchises (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Purge, Scream), it tries to extend a premise that was never especially rich in its original incarnation and has since been exhausted by endless sequels.
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that → adapt → sequels
…and 3 more, not listed.
The Aporia
