Crystal Lake is based on the general idea that became the Friday the 13th film series.
That film series has been plagued by various legal issues for a very long time. The rights are kind of a mess. And every time it seems they’re all straightened out, some new wrinkle comes up.
That’s why we haven’t had a lot of Friday the 13th related stuff that been able to stick around (and why Friday the 13th: The Series has nothing at all to do with movies when it hit back in the 90s/80s.)
By basing this new series on just one screenplay and not calling it “Friday the 13th”, Crystal Lake avoided most, if not all, this trouble.
What they did with that freedom is really solid, really new, and pays some solid homage to many of the popular bits from the original film series.
In this iteration, we get to know Pamela Vorhees a whole lot better. We also get a better feel for the town of Crystal Lake itself. And, perhaps most interestingly, it provides an actual coherent narrative that explains and ties together a number of things about our favorite mother and son slasher duo.
Linda Cardellini continues to be one of my absolute favorite, generally underrated, actors out there. Her performance as Pam Vorhees is utterly fantastic throughout this series. As she swings from kind to adamant to utterly murderous, every step in the transition is perfectly understandable. Not exactly “sane”… but definitely not random.
The rest of the cast do a solid job, too, fleshing out the town and providing murder fodder and red herrings. If you remember the original films, you may even recognize some of the characters (played, of course, by different actors now).
Compared to the original films, this series shifts the timeline a bit. It’s not a remake of any one of or a mashup of more than one of the movies. It’s really its own take on the basic idea of: “Mother with a disfigured son works at a summer camp. The kid drowns. Then, a little while later, murders begin to disrupt the normally quiet town.”
They dropped all eight episodes of this at once earlier this week. As has been increasingly the case, I wish this had been given a weekly release. There’s not much way this would have been do-able on regular network TV (or even basic cable… some of those kills are wonderfully graphic), but having some time for people to theorize and play with possibilities could have really built a lot of buzz for this show. It deserves attention.
Much like the new take on Carrie, this expands the story and general world we’re used to. I dig it. A lot. And I’m all for a bit more exploration.
- Tragedy Girls – October 18, 2026
- Crystal Lake – October 17, 2026
- Street Fighter (2026) – October 15, 2026
Leave a Reply