Critical Reception of 'Crystal Lake' Friday the 13th Prequel

It’s been close to 20 years since Jason Voorhees sunk back to the depths of Crystal Lake, after 2009’s Friday the 13th failed to resuscitate the smash ’80s slasher franchise. Now, cult studio A24 (Backrooms, Euphoria) has entered the waters for a prequel series focused on Jason’s mother Pamela – the original film’s serial killer – driven to murder to prevent the lakeside Crystal Lake camp from reopening, decades after her young son drowned.

Given that Pam’s decapitation in the first film is what awakens Jason into being a supernatural killing machine, Friday the 13th is essentially a prequel already. Set in the immediate months after Jason’s death (albeit now in the ’70s rather than the ’50s), Crystal Lake fills a gap that only superfans really care about. But being an inessential prequel doesn’t really matter if the miniseries captures what made Friday the 13th a hit.

Across its eight episodes Crystal Lake does deliver many of its franchise’s bloody highs. Expect campy chase sequences with creepy killer POV camera shots and unnerving dolly zooms; an atonal score from Giosue Greco; ever-creative kills pulled off with old-school physical effects, grosser in their gory unreality; and, of course, a relentless antagonist who abides by the genre’s No.1 rule that sex is a sin punishable by death.

It’s also led by an incredible performance from Linda Cardellini, fresh off her Emmy win for DTF St Louis. As Pam, Cardellini continually adjusts a slipping mask of sanity. Her grief-fuelled rage goes beyond the bloodied, manic scenes involving deep-fryers and machetes; she’s just as radiant in an aggressive mid-argument adjustment of her bangs, or dropping a smile as soon as she’s not being watched.

Crystal Lake also has two fantastic, tragic turns from child actors Callum Vinson (Chucky), who plays Jason, and newcomer Gwendolyn Sundstrom, who is put through hell as Jason’s only friend. Despite that, the series is guilty of the same mistake made by so many Voorhees victims: looking over its shoulder rather than ahead, it continually trips up.

To align with the first film, Crystal Lake’s murder spree must be lesser-than, with showrunner Brad Caleb Kane (It: Welcome To Derry) repeatedly pausing the action mid-splatter, occasionally for multiple episodes. Many of contemporary TV’s most irritating tropes are present as a result, including an unnecessary backstory oddly reminiscent of Stranger Things. And the halting action is often used to establish what’s already baked into Friday the 13th – that the Voorhees are victims, too.

These faults were pre-empted earlier this year with A24’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – a surreal story of a director trying to reboot an ’80s slasher franchise, at first too caught up in lore before embracing horror’s carnal pleasures. That lesson wasn’t passed on.

Crystal Lake is streaming on Stan from October 16.

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