46 Years Later, A Horror Icon’s Origin Story Is Finally Revealed
Horror movie franchises have a little more leeway when it comes to lore. Freddy Krueger can travel through dreams, Ghostface can be multiple people, and John Kramer somehow swallowed a wax-covered microcassette that was discovered during his autopsy. But that doesn’t mean that the weird parts of horror canon can’t be attempted to be simplified through spinoffs or prequels.
The latest attempt is Crystal Lake, a prequel to the iconic Friday the 13th film series starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, the summer camp cook who avenges her drowned son in the first movie. But this trailer actually does what that movie never thought to do: interrogate if Jason drowned in the first place. Check out the trailer below:
Set in the summer of 1971, we see Pam as she resumes her duties at Camp Crystal Lake, but as she copes with the loss of her son, Jason, she gets increasingly unhinged. “I don’t want to heal,” she says. “I want to find my son.”
In the first movie, Jason Voorhees is pretty canonically drowned, only appearing in dream sequences, and Pamela is decapitated by the time the credits roll. But while that may have made for a good horror movie, it’s no way to start a franchise, because there’s no villain left to terrorize the campers. So, inexplicably, Jason Voorhees was revived and wreaked havoc for multiple movies afterwards.
This never really made sense. In fact, special effects artist Tom Savini chose not to return for Friday the 13th Part Two for that very reason. “I actually turned down Friday the 13th Part Two to do The Burning because Jason was running around. And as you know, there is no Jason,” Savini said in a documentary short. “If you watch a Friday the 13th movie past Part One, you're stupid. Because there's no Jason. There shouldn't be a Jason.”
This is the paradox that Crystal Lake is trying to set right, and the explanation may not be as simple as you may think. At one point in the trailer, we see someone confront Pam and ask, “What do you think the people of Crystal Lake would say if they knew who you and Jason really were?” This ominous sentence is paired with a shot of a spooky hallway, so there’s possibly more to this story than just a mother’s rage.
This series may have a lot of the same hallmarks as fellow horror movie prequel series It: Welcome to Derry, but this has a much clearer spot in the canon, and a much simpler goal: make the rest of the movies make sense. It may be almost half a century later, but better late than never.