Review: Crystal Lake Gets Unnecessary Expansion in Gloomy, Silly Friday the 13th Series
Linda Cardellini does her best, but this bewildering attempt to add a story to one of horror's thinnest franchises makes it the most pointless IP. Endless IP fatigue has forced us to ask questions we never really wanted or needed to ask. How did the pink women in Grease become Pink Ladies? What would happen if one of The Craft's witches had a child who was also a witch...
The endless wear and tear of IP has forced us to ask questions we never really wanted or needed to ask. How did the pink women in Grease become the pink women? What would happen if one of The Craft's wizards had a child who was also a wizard? Why is the yellow brick road yellow? What is Linda Blair up to these days?
No one or anything really dies anymore, which has long been true in the world of slashers, where no amount of stabbing, shooting, and exploding will stop masked assassins from killing again and again and again. In recent years, the timeline of the Halloween franchise has been altered so that Michael Myers can regain his head and resume his reign of terror, while Ghostface reappears to hunt down the younger relatives of his old enemies. While Leatherface prepares for A24's return from Obsession's Curry Barker and the double Nightmare on Elm Street, it's time to head back to Camp Crystal Lake to see what the desperate rights holders will do with Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees, the young hockey player who enjoys goofy masks.
Given the low-budget franchise's success (12 films since 1980, grossing nearly $500 million worldwide) and the killer's still-strong brand recognition, it's surprising we haven't seen him since the mid-2009 remake (especially since quality has never been a pressing issue for Franchi). This is partly due to the headache of fighting over rights, but also the difficulty of fitting a killer of Jason's stature into a horror genre that now values trauma over terror. The Friday the 13th movies were brainwashed, thinly plotted excuses to push couples closer together in the darkness, the thinking brighter and the blood heavier. Some were better than others (1984's final season, which wasn't a final season, and was a notable high point), but the quality was low, and the more a filmmaker added to the page, the less it felt like a Friday the 13th movie.
Which brings us to Crystal Lake, an almost brand new game for the 2026 return to the franchise. It's now an eight-episode series that explores Jason's story, but focuses mainly on the psychology of his murderous mother, Pamela, who was revealed to be the killer in the first film. What made Pamela a psychiatrist? Why did Jason survive his drowning? What exactly are we doing here?
Pamela is a character who, in less than 15 minutes of a 46-year-old movie, has more plot twists than a single person. But now she's a former nightclub singer and Stepford wife turned grieving mother turned avenging angel. It's an extension of expansion in a show that's not as outrageous as it could be, but more of an acceptable answer to an L.A. conference room question that should never have been asked in the first place.
In the lead, Linda Cardellini, fresh off an Emmy, tries to bring herself credit and almost succeeds. The violent strictness of her camp cook, a single mother whose son accidentally dies in the cold (too soon for us to get emotionally invested), is close to tempting because of how willing she is to go. But the tone of the show is far less appealing than his brutal performance at times. Creator Brad Caleb Cain asks us to take this silliness seriously at times, as some snarky comments about the medical and social treatment of women in the 70s are made before he leans into Syfy channel silliness. To justify an entire series, he gives us a flashback, a plot, some romance, a spot of police corruption, a sly journalist, a meeting, an evil life coach and a destructive company, an overbooked blast camp. It's Bates Motel , but for a movie without even an iota of psychological texture yet meddling in a franchise as big as Friday the 13th , it's not exactly offensive, just downright pointless.
It's not like a TV series directly copying the shoot-and-slash formula of the movies would work either (even the '80s effort used Friday the 13th as a symbol of bad luck rather than a way to bring Jason to the small screen), but just a TV series might not have been the best idea in the first place. Horror buffs may appreciate the (surprisingly unpleasant) fanservice, but for everyone else, the over-complicated and underpowered Crystal Lake won't warrant a stay. Jason will inevitably return (a new movie is reportedly in the works) but, despite Cardellini's best efforts, it might be best to leave Pamela behind.
Crystal Lake is available now on Peacock in the US, on Stan in Australia on 16 October and on Now in the UK on 19 October.