‘Crystal Lake’ Will Offer More Brutal Kills Than Films, Go Deep on Jason’s Background

Crystal Lake creator Brad Caleb Kane says the prequel origin story to the classic Friday the 13th franchise is “a lot more brutal,” than the films, with episodes full of “really creative kills.”

“I went into the season knowing that we are going to spend a couple of episodes on Pam[ela Voorhees’] blossoming, her journey, her psychology. But I also know what the Friday the 13th fans are here for because I’m here for it, too — that’s really creative kills and a whole lot of them. So if you’re wondering if we’re ever going to go full fathom Friday the 13th, we go there and we drop a lot of bodies in really creative ways. It’s a lot more brutal. I think it’s even more brutal in many ways from some of the movies.”

Along with the series creator, stars Linda Cardellini, William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins, Gwendolyn Sundstrom and Callum Vinson also appeared at a Thursday panel at New York Comic Con, where Kane teased what is ahead for Friday the 13th entry.

“I wanted to dip into all the time that occurs between what we knew was Jason’s drowning and the woman that we know from the first movie. We meet Pamela Voorhees for like 10 minutes in the last movie, memorably played by by Betsy Palmer,” the series creator says. “Then she gets her head lopped off. It’s a little bit of F13 blue balls, and I feel like you want to know more.”

For Cardellini, part of what excited her about a role Kane always envisioned her for was the whodunit. “I went back and I watched the original again, and I loved how it operates. At the end, you find out it’s somebody you didn’t know all along, and you get to know her for a short time. SBetsy Palmer gives this magnificently wild performance, and it’s unforgettable. But you don’t get to know more about her. So I thought, [this series is] not like you’re just taking somebody in his family and making a story about them. She is the original killer. There is a story there as to how she gets to that place and, what is that story?”

To bring her on board for the series, Kane pitched Cardellini and then she read a couple episodes, though she “never knew how it ended until we got there.” It was a role the actress says she realized she’s never been able to do.

“I’ve never been asked to do that. There were so many facets to the character. There’s a real woman who is a mother and a loving person and a new person in town, a fish out of water; somebody running from this past; somebody who has like sexual interests in somebody who she meets in her town,” she continued. “Also there’s this other side to her and this rage that once that starts to come out, what does that turn on in this person? I was never allowed to play that much rage; you only do it in this genre.”

In terms of what parts of the cinematic universe fans will see versus what they won’t, Kane noted that due to where it falls in the narrative timeline, the hockey mask was the one thing they couldn’t have in play for the series. But they did “get shot-by-shot recreations of things you see from the movies… that really re-contextualize things that you think you know.”

To help them do this, they filmed in the original New Jersey woods where the first film was shot.

“There are no woods and no trees and no leaves that look like Jersey woods trees and leaves, so we had to go back to the OG to to Blairstown, New Jersey, the original town, which is amazing,” said Kane. “It was very welcoming and hasn’t changed a day in 45 years.”

In those woods and at that summer camp, Camp Crystal will tap into the “novelization of part two. “They go pretty deep on Jason’s background, Jason in the woods crawling out of the lake, and all that stuff. But it’s a little bit invention too,” the series creator shared. “For me, Pamela talks about her relationship with Jason and how much she meant to him, and we see the person that she is in the first movie, but we don’t really see the cornerstone of that relationship. We don’t really see her and Jason as people before all that stuff happened. She wasn’t born a psychopath, but there was a journey that took her from a loving and protective mother to the person we know in the first movie, and I wanted to show that.”

The series also wanted to show the real Jason as a child, which meant putting a young Vinson into a 13 pound-prosthetic head. “Linda got very protective of Calum with that, too. It was like, get that thing off his head now. He’s too hot. You’re burning his brain.”

As a series focused on building the origins of the Friday the 13th story, Crystal Lake will feature both original, entirely new, as well as established characters from the film. Among the returning are Dorf (Cameron Scoggins) and Ralph Neeley (Nick Cordileone). In terms of how fans will see them in the series, “What Brad did, what the writing team did, was take this thing that’s a trope for horror films… and fleshed it out in a way where you go, ‘Well, who is he? Why is he this way? What’s he warning people about? Where is he coming from?’” Cordileone said. “It was an absolute gift to just come and be able to live that. He’s an unreliable narrator too. But he’s very positive about some things. It’s a real tug of war.

“We really calibrated on set as we went in terms of the characters from the movie versus the characters we’re doing here. Cameron and Nick, sometimes asked me, ‘How Crazy Ralph do you want me to go here? How do you want me to Dorf out?’” added Kane. “Sometimes Nick would put on this beautiful heartfelt performance, and I’d go get him between the takes, and just go, ‘Just do the voice, just do the crazy,’ and he would do it. The same thing with Cameron, you know, go full Dorf out, and he would do it, for better or worse.”