Did You Catch Baby Jason in the ‘Crystal Lake’ Teaser Trailer!?

The Friday the 13th franchise is a complicated one, especially when you look back at the first few films and try to make sense of just how quickly Jason Voorhees evolved.

As most horror fans know, the original Friday the 13th, released in 1980, didn’t even feature Jason as the killer. As famously joked about in Wes Craven’s Scream, the murderer was Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s grieving mother, who sought revenge against the camp counselors she blamed for allowing her young son to drown at Camp Crystal Lake.

The film ends with one of horror’s greatest final scares, as a young Jason suddenly erupts from the lake and drags the final girl, Alice Hardy, from her canoe. It’s generally understood to be a dream sequence, but it was memorable enough that audiences wanted more.

A sequel quickly followed.

Rather than bringing Pamela back, Friday the 13th Part 2 transformed Jason into a feral, backwoods killer wearing a burlap sack over his head, avenging the death of his mother. It’s actually a perfect companion piece to the original. One movie is about a mother avenging her son. The next is about a son avenging his mother.

Then came Friday the 13th Part III.

That’s the movie that introduced the iconic hockey mask and, in many ways, transformed Jason from a slasher villain into one of horror’s Mount Rushmore icons. Ten more films, Freddy vs. Jason, comic books, video games, toys, and eventually the canonized 2009 reboot would follow, cementing Jason as one of the most recognizable horror characters ever created.

Then everything stopped.

Years of legal battles between original screenwriter Victor Miller and Horror Inc. brought the franchise to a standstill, leaving Jason trapped in legal limbo while virtually every other horror icon continued to evolve.

Thankfully, those rights issues have finally begun to clear. The launch of Jason Universe opened the door for new projects built around the original film, including A24‘s highly anticipated Peacock series, .