How Do You Get ‘Friday the 13th’ Fans to Care About Jason’s Mom? ‘Crystal Lake’ Team on Their Ambitious Attempt and Decision to Leave Out the Hockey Mask

“You should know that Jason’s mother, Mrs. Voorhees, was the original killer.”

That quote from “Scream,” in which Ghostface trips up Casey (Drew Barrymore) while asking her about scary movies, is a reminder that for many modern audiences, “Friday the 13th” matriarch Pamela Voorhees exists as little more than a trivia question. Yet Peacock and A24 are betting big on audiences’ interest in an epic tale about the murderous mother.

“Crystal Lake” drops all eight episodes of the first season today, and creator and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane knows that slasher audiences might not initially be interested in an hours-long backstory of a woman on the edge in the ’70s, played here by recent Emmy winner Linda Cardellini.

“I’m an old school slasher fan. I certainly didn’t get into [1981 summer camp slasher] ‘The Burning’ to hear about [the killer] Cropsy’s long backstory,” Kane says. “You get into it for visceral thrills, and for how those movies make us feel — especially as kids, when most of us experience them for the first time. But in doing TV, and I’ve done a lot of TV up to this point, there really is a lot you can do delving into character and motivations and transformation.”

For the uninitiated, 1980’s “Friday the 13th” is about the young counselors of Camp Crystal Lake getting murdered as they try to reopen the property years after a tragic incident. In the end, the killer is revealed to be Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who blamed her son Jason’s drowning years earlier on counselors hooking up when they should have been watching him, and she decided to teach this new batch of horny teens a lesson.

The “Friday” franchise swelled into a dependable moneymaker, with 11 more films, a TV show, video games and merch galore following the original indie slasher. The focus shifted to Jason — now a hulking, undead killer — as the antagonist, leaving Mrs. Voorhees as little more than a footnote in the series. But with “Crystal Lake,” Kane, who is also the showrunner of horror prequel series “It: Welcome to Derry,” was interested in creating a fully realized antihero with a strong sense of time and place.

“We knew we were going to do the Pamela Voorhees story, but there’s very little known about her, except what we know from the first movie,” he says. “Betsy Palmer had her ideas about Pamela’s backstory if you read her interviews, and some ‘Friday the 13th’ comics dove into the backstory a bit and went in different directions. But when you get into television storytelling, people come to TV for character. We didn’t know much about the town of Crystal Lake, even though it’s fun to see in the movie. Where we started was, ‘What decade are we telling the story?’ And obviously, before the events of the first movie that take place in 1980, what was happening in that decade in America? Can we start with those thematics and somehow parallel the story of America in the ’70s and all the changes that were happening? There were a lot of changes that were happening for Pamela Voorhees and how she became the mother of all slashers that we ultimately know.”

Cardellini, who has had key roles on critically acclaimed series from “Freaks and Geeks” and “ER” to “Mad Men” and “DTF St. Louis,” was excited to work on an ambitious project which had a broad canvas for her character and an opportunity for her to contribute to its success.

“It was really fun to talk to Brad about the show,” she says. “I also felt like he was excited to talk about it with me and to hear what I had to say. It wasn’t something where I was going to be shut out and just told what to do. The collaboration of it was exciting. The fact that I had never played anything like that draws me too. There’re so many things going for the show. Pam, she’s a singer and she’s a murderer. She’s also having sexual relationships with these men. There were so many different facets that, as a woman of a certain age, there is not that much to do in any given role. There was so much to do. There was so much to uncover. It was such a wild ride that it was just irresistible to me.”

Cardellini was also intrigued by the chance to develop Pamela’s unique motivation throughout the series.

“For Pam, everything is about Jason, which is great because the franchise is about Jason, and it’s wonderful that you get to meet her and understand her, because she is the original killer, but she’s only doing it because of Jason,” she says. “Everything relates back to her joining with Jason. So even what looks like a selfless move or like a move to help somebody else is really in service of her reconnecting with him. That codependent, dangerous relationship she has with him in some ways starts off very vulnerable and true and relatable. A lot of times I’m trying to figure out, ‘How do I relate to this person? How do I justify the things that they do?’”

A key win Kane had in developing the show was that “Crystal Lake” avoided the previous rights-holder complexities that have challenged films in the past. For example, the ninth and tenth installments — “Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday” and “Jason X” — couldn’t use the “Friday the 13th” moniker in the titles. Luckily, the previous friction had dissipated.

“There were really no issues rights-wise with the show,” Kane says. “We weren’t given any particular parameters about what we could and couldn’t do. There were discussions about the hockey mask, because that’s such an iconic look for Jason and that’s what everybody thinks about. But we’re doing a show that predates Pamela’s murder in the first movie, and the hockey mask … obviously, we all know that didn’t come until the third movie. This is the ‘Star Wars’ of slashers … It’s episode three.”

One critical component of getting the time and place to feel right was recreating the ’70s, rather than leaning on a corny pastiche or tired visual clichés. The quest for verisimilitude was essential for Kane.

“When I think of that texture to ’70s movies, I think of the paranoid ’70s thrillers that commented on the decade more accurately than anything else,” he says. “I think about ‘The Parallax View’ and ‘Klute’ and ‘All the President’s Men.’ There was a look and a feel to them. Movies like William Friedkin’s ‘Sorcerer’ … I didn’t want it to feel homage-y. I wanted it to feel steeped in the 70s. You could really go with the crazy things that are happening in the story and not feel like, ‘Oh, this is pageantry. This doesn’t feel real.’”

Ultimately, Kane believes “Crystal Lake” is buoyed by Cardellini, the not-so-secret weapon at the heart of the show.

“She’s in one great thing after another. It’s because she’s in them that they are elevated to the level that they are,” he says. “I really believe we’re doing a ‘Friday the 13th’ show here. There’s a question of whether it should be elevated to being peak TV, but she brings that to it. She brings gravitas, passion and authenticity to everything she does. Thankfully, she brought it to our show as well.”

Watch the trailer for “Crystal Lake” below. All eight episodes are now streaming on Peacock.