What came before “Kill her, mommy”
Review: Crystal Lake suffers a bit from its obsession with Pam Voorhees
Friday the 13th prequel series based on Jason’s mom drags at first, then hits a vein.
Credit:
via Peacock/Matt Infante
Credit:
via Peacock/Matt Infante
Peacock’s series, Crystal Lake, doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie when you first press play, even though it’s set up to be a prequel to the original film. (This review includes spoilers of the original Friday the 13th movie but avoids major Crystal Lake spoilers.)
Instead, Crystal Lake strives to build a drama that’s half homage, half uncharted territory while giving a long-awaited backstory to Pamela Voorhees. The original villain in the first film, Pam Voorhees, shocked audiences in 1980 by popping up out of nowhere in the midst of a brutal camp counselor killing spree, then confronting the final girl with a Norman Bates-like delivery of the movie’s chilling tagline, “Kill her, mommy,” using the voice of her drowned son Jason.
via Paramount Pictures
via Peacock
via Paramount Pictures
via Peacock
Although the hockey-masked killer, Jason Voorhees, became the horror icon at the center of the franchise, his mom, Pam, continued to fascinate fans who knew very little about her. Beheaded in the first film after just 13 minutes onscreen, her spirit would occasionally appear in later films, but the original actor, Betsy Palmer, who portrayed Pam refused to return, largely because the character has no depth.
Ars dug into news archives and found interviews where Palmer explained that the later films did nothing to expand the character, offering only “stupid” lines. There was no reason for the actor—who at the height of her fame dated James Dean and was often typecast as the sweet-faced girl-next-door—to stoop to stepping back into Pam’s shoes. She famously only agreed to do the first movie because her Mercedes broke down on the Connecticut Turnpike and she needed a new car. She worked 10 days to capture her scenes, got paid $10,000, bought a new car, and expected nobody to remember her performance.
“I read that script and thought ‘What a piece of junk,’” Palmer said in 2005.
Palmer often criticized the later movies for bringing back Jason’s mom but giving her nothing to do. So, while some die-hard Friday the 13th fans may find Crystal Lake slow and foreign in the first few episodes, it’s worth sticking around for the first stab at fulfilling Palmer’s dream of Pam being more than just a helicopter mom of a vengeful boy living at the bottom of a cursed lake.
A fresh Pam Voorhees perspective
Crystal Lake showrunner Brad Caleb Kane—who previously produced HBO’s Welcome to Derry, which gave Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT a riveting backstory—took many liberties when approaching Pam’s backstory, including shifting the timeline of events.
In the original movie, Jason dies in 1958, but Kane wanted to root the story in historical events that resonated with the themes from the movie, so he shifted Jason’s drowning to 1971–2. He told Daily Dead that it was more important to him to do a “character-rich,” “emotionally resonant” show. By having Jason conceived in the early 1960s, he could draw on actual experiments on mothers during that time and invent a corporate enemy whose experiments on Pam set her up to become the type of fiercely protective mother who would kill for her son. Talking to Esquire, he explained that “continuity is wonky, anyway” across the movies. And by shifting the timeline, he told the Daily Dead that he got to weave in a scientific “Douglas Sirk-meets-David Cronenberg” body horror episode that you’d never expect would come out of a Friday the 13th franchise installment.
Without spoiling plot details, I’ll note this backstory injects much more tension into the moment that Jason drowns at the camp. It also makes Pam’s desperation to believe that Jason’s still alive—and needs her to kill counselors for his protection—much more relatable. In interviews, Kane confirmed he wanted to add context to key moments in the original movie without feeling bound to perfectly tie in the series.
In interviews, Palmer confirmed that she invented her own backstory for Pam that went back to conception, too. In her version, Pam gets pregnant in high school and decides to have him anyway, which is why she’s so protective of Jason. In 1982, Palmer said that she hoped through her intense acting that viewers would sense that there was more good in Pam than viewers knew, saying, “I can never play a part where I think there’s nothing good about the person at all. You hope that acting can explain why people do some of the things that they do—to show some truth.”
Kane told Daily Dead that when he spoke to Linda Cardellini about portraying Pam in Crystal Lake, she agreed that the character must be played in “protective mama bear mode” because “it all goes back to Jason, her love for Jason, and her dedication to Jason.”
Going “full Friday the 13th” by the end
For Friday the 13th fans who early on might feel impatient for Crystal Lake to stop talking about evil corporations and self-help gurus and get back to the camp slayings they came for, don’t fret, you won’t have to wait that long. By the third episode, murderous Jason begins to more prominently feature in episodes and the gory deaths begin, as a swarm of innocent hippies ignore warnings and are drawn into the camp, like lambs to the slaughter.
This is the turning point when the TV series starts to feel more familiar and picks up the pace measurably. Although the hockey mask never appears, Kane lovingly re-creates exact scenes from the original movie to offer flashes of eye candy to Jason fanatics. There are easter eggs all over, and the series offers a good excuse to rewatch the original movie to catch even more and compare the gorgeous haunting lake views.
Kane is hoping that the series finally showing the horrifying but oddly relatable depth of this unshakeable connection between mother and son will be a hit, so it can possibly run for multiple seasons, he told Esquire.
When pitching the series to A24, Kane knew he wanted to do his own thing, while maintaining that “what was sacred to me is that a certain segment of the fans feel like I was doing a loving homage to the movies,” he told Daily Dead. On this mission, the series weaves in town folk names and lines from the original movie, as well as, of course, bringing back Pam Voorhees’ iconic cable-knit sweater. The series also seems to nod to Palmer’s past in making Cardellini’s Pam a well-known singer who styles her hair similarly to how young Palmer did in her starlet days.
Growing up the kind of kid who read novelizations of horror movies, Kane also made sure that the special effects makeup is next-level. He worked with “very detail-oriented” artists who leave little to the imagination, as hippie numbers dwindle, eyes are gouged, and mother and son “go full Friday the 13th” by the series end.
