Linda Cardellini Teases Approach to Pamela Voorhees in ‘Crystal Lake’: “It’s Really Fun”

Friday the 13th fans (hi) are anxiously awaiting Peacock’s Crystal Lake prequel series that’s set to arrive this October. Not just because we can never get enough of Jason Voorhees and that lake with a death curse, but because the series is finally going to delve deeper into the horror icon’s mother, Pamela Voorhees (played by Linda Cardellini).

Listen, Pamela may kill a whole lot of innocent people in that first film, released in 1980, but I always found her to be a sympathetic character. A mother who lost her only son to drowning because the camp counselors weren’t watching him? Who wouldn’t be pissed off? Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned, etc. Despite her importance to the franchise, though, the films have never really delved too deeply into who she is, what drives her, or where she comes from. She’s a complex killer, one whose story is begging to be told.

And that’s exactly what Crystal Lake is setting out to do.

Linda Cardellini recently sat down with Deadline to express just that, offering hints about what we can expect from the show’s depiction of Pamela.

Said Cardellini, “She’s important to the series, but sort of unexplored. So I thought that would be really, really fun, to do something I’d never done.”

And when it comes to showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, Cardellini adds he “has made sort of this mixtape of all the things that he would love to see happen for her. It goes all over the place for her character, and it’s really fun.” 

Okay, so we still don’t know too much. What’s obvious from Cardellini’s statement, though, is that fans are in for a wild ride with Crystal Lake. I fully expect something on the deranged level of Bates Motel, with the show carving into Pamela and Jason’s relationship. Either way, I’m excited to see a character who has always been a major piece of the franchise finally get her due.

Based on the slasher series begun by Sean S. Cunningham in 1980, Crystal Lake follows a doomed small town where camp counselors come to die. It tells the origins of the Voorhees family and leads up to the “birth” of the ultimate slasher: Jason.