Fans of “Friday the 13th” need to come to terms with something if they are going to give this show a chance – this is reality.
This is the future.
This is the new “Friday the 13th.”
We got a whole heap of movies with explicit nudity, graphic violence, and lots and lots of the big fella stalking slowly through the woods.
I love these movies.
Adore them.
With the first four films you have one story that twists and turns, and if you include V and VI, you get a continuous story with at least one character that carries through.
None of that is to say that things are smooth, or full of deep stories or logic, but it all does work, in its way.
The films are sort of charming in how they adhere to what they are with a refusal to be more than that. They sorta deviate once you get to Part VI, and they get a little more interesting, and weird, but deep down, they are what they are – slasher films.
There’s a point though, where they have sorta said what they needed to say. As fans, we want those films to never stop, but the fact is that unless the franchise evolved to some degree, there wasn’t anything else to say. They never really invested Jason, essentially a golem, with a personality, or a deep lore, and the casts were just final girls and a collection of horny teens ready to die.
They tried, with the remake, to bring back the scariness of Jason, and, for me, did a darned good job of it. Alas, many fans want more drugs, more sex, and more silly fun. I felt the movie tried to pander to the old-school fans too much.
“Friday the 13th,” as a series, has run out of road.
Enter “Crystal Lake,” a prequel series that brings emotion, lore, and real characters to a series. The most shocking thing for me, as a longtime fan, is how they take a movie series about an unstoppable killer seriously.
They aren’t hamming it up.
“Crystal Lake” is flawed, but is an earnest attempt to evolve this franchise, and I think it’s a heck of a good start.
“Crystal Lake” follows Pamela Voorhees, a single mother raising her special needs son Jason in the small town of Crystal Lake. Pamela works at a local summer camp as a cook, and she and her son are making the best of an imperfect life. Jason, friendly and smart, is an outcast at the camp, though he has one close friend there. When Jason drowns tragically due to the selfish actions of a counselor who was supposed to be watching him, it sets off a series of events that will change Pamela and Crystal Lake forever.
It is a bit of a shock to the system to see “Friday the 13th” become a bit of a melodrama, with a heavy helping of blood, but it works. It shows that there is still blood in this stone. The problem with the films was that they became more a product and less of an artistic device. Here, we find that you can have both. Yes, this is meant to sell commercials, and all that, but there was intention here. There was thoughtfulness. There was care.
As fans we are so hung up on the people making these films looking like us that we get lost in the weeds. You need new voices on these legacy properties, and new eyes on what we’ve all seen a thousand times before. We want someone who will take care of these legacy franchises, and we never know who that will be.
The show is good.
Very good.
We get to know Pamela, and her pain, and, more controversially, we get to know Jason, as a boy.
And it is controversial.
We want to see Jason as an unstoppable killing machine, but without a human beneath it all he’s a robot, a golem, and it’s harder to care about him, or the franchise deeply.
These are not victims in the show, they are characters. Not all are deep, but they are given more breath and life than most we have seen in the films.
The series pays homage to the past, and fills Crystal Lake with familiar faces and names, as we look to the past to understand the future.
There is great acting, more gore than the films ever got away with, and a lot of surprises.
Not all of which work.
I think the show would have been more effective, and stronger if it avoided a touch of the supernatural it gets into, and Jason’s backstory is…a lot. It’s a wild swing that feels like it didn’t need to be explained, but here we are. I think you could add depth and emotion to the structure that already existed, but, if we are going to breathe new life into this dead body, we need to get over our expectations.
We need to let go of the past.
It’s a fun show.
A gory, crazy, emotional show.
I hope that it informs the future of the franchise, if not directly, then by showing that you can make a “Friday the 13th” that is still a full and whole movie with emotion and stakes, but also with scares and violence.
I didn’t love everything they tried in “Crystal Lake,” but it’s so much fun to see Jason get a bit of the prestige format treatment, and that the show has been well received by the public.
THAT is the shocking thing here, that in 2026 we have seen life breathed into the “Friday the 13th” franchise. Who can say what comes next, but what we can see is that there is a future, and all of our beloved slashers should only be so lucky.
3.75 out of 5
