Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Crystal Lake.
Every iconic horror movie franchise seems to be taking a stab at television these days. Child’s Play did it with Chucky; Alien: Earth had a fun first season; and Mike Flanagan‘s reinterpretation of Carrie was recently released on Prime Video. With a years-long lawsuit resolved, the Friday the 13th‘s franchise, dormant since the 2009 film reboot, can rise from the depths. A24 and Peacock‘s prequel series Crystal Lake, starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, mostly takes place before the events of 1980’s Friday the 13th. After delivering its own reimagining of that movie’s opening kill scene, Brad Caleb Kane‘s series incorporates a shocking twist that changes the iconic moment for the worse.
‘Friday the 13th’s Opening Kill Scene Keeps the Villain’s Identity a Mystery
Friday the 13th, written by Victor Miller and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, started as an admitted rip-off of Halloween. It’s no surprise that, just as John Carpenter and Debra Hill‘s horror flick had an opening kill set years before the events of the main plot, so too does Friday the 13th. The film opens in 1958, 21 years in the past, one night at Camp Crystal Lake. A group of counselors is singing in one cabin as an unseen person moves through another cabin of sleeping campers, revealed only through the camera’s first-person perspective.
Crystal Lake camp counselors Barry (Willie Adams) and Claudette (Debra S. Hayes) make googly eyes at each other before they leave the group and sneak into the camp’s empty barn. They go upstairs to the loft to lie down and do things you should never, ever do in a slasher movie when they’re interrupted by that unknown character. The audience doesn’t see what they see, but Barry and Claudette first think they’ve been caught and then become terrified. Barry is stabbed in the gut, and as Claudette tries to run away, the killer approaches until Claudette’s screams abruptly stop.
It’s quite an effective opening scene. Unlike Halloween, which begins with the origin story of six-year-old Michael Myers, viewers of Friday the 13th have no idea who the assailant is. The film then becomes a mystery where the killer’s identity is never revealed until the third act, when Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) steps out of the shadows and starts ranting about the counselors who weren’t paying attention when her son drowned.
‘Crystal Lake’ Replaces Pamela Voorhees With Another Character
Although Crystal Lake‘s main action takes place in the lead-up to Friday the 13th‘s first kill, the show is set in the 1970s instead of 1958. Still, all the ingredients are there. Jason (Callum Vinson) is introduced as a child before the drowning incident that leads his mother to unravel — as are two of Crystal Lake’s camp counselors, Barry (Phoenix Parnevik) and Claudette (Danielle Kotch). Because of their names, we know exactly what their fate will be.
Cardellini’s Pamela, wearing the iconic blue sweater, checks on the sleeping campers while Barry and Claudette retreat to the barn to knock boots. Then, in a fun recreation of the original scene, the ill-fated lovebirds are stabbed to death, but the perspective doesn’t shift to Pamela standing over her victims holding a machete. Crystal Lake goes for a twist, revealing that Barry and Claudette haven’t been stabbed by Jason’s mother. Instead, the killer is revealed to be Jason’s only friend, a preteen girl named Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), her need for revenge made real after she gets high on her new hippie friend’s stash. While Pamela does walk in on the crime and finishes the teens off, the event has already been changed
The opening of Friday the 13th is the inciting incident that leads to everything else. Pamela Voorhees, driven to murderous rage by her son’s drowning, decides to get revenge by killing every camp counselor she comes across. Her mind is frayed, and she believes every teenager who sets foot in Camp Crystal Lake is responsible. That motivation, regardless of its simplicity, created an iconic horror villain — one of the reasons there’s a TV series about her origins 46 years later. In trying to have its own identity, Crystal Lake dishonors its most important character by taking away one of her most memorable moments of agency. While the series needed to set itself apart from the rest of the franchise, it didn’t need to rewrite history in the process.
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