‘Crystal Lake’s’ showrunner breaks down his bold new reimagining of Jason and Pamela Voorhees’ origin story.
‘Crystal Lake’s’ showrunner breaks down his bold take on Jason and Pamela Voorhees’ origin story, connecting their plight to American exceptionalism, and mixing fan service with risky reinvention.
It’s no exaggeration to say that horror cinema would be irrevocably different today without Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees. This humble summer-camp slasher has endured for over 45 years, producing a dozen movies that have taken Jason to Hell, outer space, and pitted him against The Springwood Slasher. This has evolved into endless comics, video games, and a growing “Jason Universe” that finds new ways to explore this formative franchise and its celebrated slasher icon.
Friday the 13th has faced some legal roadblocks that have kept it from returning to cinemas, but it’s finally making its grand return in the form of an eight-episode series from A24 and Peacock that explores Jason and Pamela Voorhees’ tragic backstories. Crystal Lake is both incredibly reverential toward its source material, but also brave enough to take this property to new and exciting places. To celebrate Friday the 13th and Jason’s return, Brad Caleb Kane, Crystal Lake’s showrunner and head writer, breaks down the season’s biggest Easter Eggs, craziest kills, grounding the season in science fact rather than science fiction, and why “fans will have their machetes out” after Project Argonaut.
DREAD CENTRAL: Pamela Voorhees has always been such an important part of this franchise and an iconic figure as far as female slasher horror villains are concerned, albeit someone who I think often goes overlooked. Why was she someone you wanted to dig deeper into and how did you ultimately decide that this would be more so her story than it is Jason’s?
BRAD CALEB KANE: The idea that they were going to do a Pamela Voorhees prequel predates me. I know A24 and Peacock had been talking for a while with other people about doing a Pamela Voorhees prequel and then that fell through ultimately before I came into it, but it seemed like a good idea because very little is known about her. We really meet her only for ten minutes at the end of the first movie and yet her presence looms so large across this franchise and across all of these movies. So it felt like an opportunity to sort of dig deeper into her character, what turned her into the mother of all slashers that we know, and really take time and explore how she became who she became. So that seemed interesting to me.
Obviously we go to these movies for sensation, for the creativity of the kills, and to take a 90-minute ride. But we go to television for a completely different experience. We go to television to live with characters much longer and take a journey with them and experience the contours of that journey and learn about them much more deeply. So, it seemed like Pamela is a very interesting character to spend time with if you’re going to do a Friday the 13th television show.
It’s funny you say that because I think that perhaps the most uncomfortable scene from the whole series is the moment where an exhausted Pamela falls asleep while she’s giving Jason a bath. It’s heartbreaking. Can you talk a little about bringing that scene to life? It’s kind of the linchpin of the whole series.
BCK: It’s really about the hazards of motherhood and the things that we don’t talk about enough when it comes to motherhood and the enormous responsibilities of that. We just expect our wives and the mothers of our children to do these things. It’s a biological imperative, but one where we don’t realize the utter emotional and physical work that goes into taking care of children, particularly in this case, special needs children. Pamela’s case is ever more dire because she’s been drugged, manipulated, and Rosemary’s Baby-ied.
I wanted her to have some guilt related to Jason that could be exploited by Elias. I wanted her to experience enough shame so that once she got control of the situation, got a handle on what was going on, and escaped this situation, she made the decision that I’m never going to let anything happen to Jason again — from me or from anyone else. Let’s put her fully in Mama Bear Mode and see how that goes. Obviously we know that isn’t the case. Something does happen to Jason, on her watch to some degree, even though you can’t really say that it’s on anyone’s watch. Really bad things happen to our kids and we can’t watch them all the time. But I wanted to feed into Pamela’s guilt and the shame that she has by turning it into the jumping off point for the transformation that occurs over the course of the series.
It’s also such a natural way to introduce Jason’s aversion to water. To have her relieve that trauma by Jason drowning at camp just makes a lot of sense. It’s such a clean way to go about it.
BCK: Well, and Elias pokes at that at the very end of the season when he says, “You took him, you had him, and then you let him drown again.” He’s not wrong in that case, even though it’s after everything that’s happened to her. He’s being an asshole, but it points at the very thing that cuts at her. She “allowed” this to happen, which activates this same inside her. So many women have this, but shouldn’t, because being a mother really is the hardest job in the world. I just wanted to illuminate all that stuff. The idea of how we hold our mothers and our wives — in terms of child-rearing and child care — to an impossibly high standard. Many of them feel like they have to live up to this, but they don’t.
You’ve mentioned Elias a few times. He’s always been this controversial and cryptic figure in thefranchise. You take a very different approach with him here regarding the whole Bellflower company man angle. He almost becomes this twisted version of Capra-esque American exceptionalism. Why did you think it was important to include Elias in this story and to reimagine him in this manner?
BCK: Well, Pamela’s age when we meet her in 1980 and the age that she is in the early ’70s, when this picks up, means that she’s a woman of a certain time period. She’s a woman of the ‘50s and the early ‘60s. And that came with a very, very specific mindset. And her husband — whoever Jason’s father was going to be — was going to have to be a man of that time. When it came to figuring out where Jason came from, who he was, and who Pam was, it made sense to go back in time. I thought it’d be interesting to do an episode as a Douglas Sirk movie, but then add a little bit of Cronenberg on top of it. He’s another one of my absolute favorite horror directors who just excels with sci-fi horror. I wanted to marry those two different styles because I felt like they would overlap in an interesting and horrific way.
It’d have been so easy to portray Elias as a traditionally physically abusive husband, but what you explore is an even deeper and more invasive form of abuse.
BCK: I just love the idea that certain people — certain ambitious people — would sell out anyone in their family for success. Cassavetes does it in Rosemary’s Baby for acting success. Here it felt appropriate for Elias to do it for corporate success, which also fit into a lot of the series’ themes. There’s this idea that came out of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, and into the period that the show starts in the early ‘70s. This was a time of real transformation in our nation from when we trusted all of our institutions — marriage, government, and the people looking out for us — to a time when Nixon happened, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. We realized everyone was lying to us and people started getting divorced because the whole construct of the perfect American dream was falling apart.
That gave America a real identity crisis. Who are we if we’re not “a chicken in every pot, a wife in every kitchen?” Trust your government and they’ll take care of you. Who are we as a nation anymore? That thought process led us into the ‘70s and the many paranoid ‘70s thrillers that were made about mistrust of government and institutions. It led us into the human potential movement, which I dig into a little bit in the series, but it also led us into hedonism. It led us into all these things as we search for what we are as a nation. I wanted that to parallel what is essentially Pam’s journey. If I am not a mother anymore, which is how I defined myself for so long, then who am I? What am I? And that is something that Pam discovers about herself along the course of the season.
On that note, the Project Argonaut angle and the experiments that are performed on both Pamela and Jason are a real big swing, yet a development that feels like it somehow fits with the films’ heightened storytelling. It’s supernatural, but also a reflection of the times. How did you come upon this idea, and were there any reservations about taking the franchise’s lore in this direction?
BCK: It’s important to understand that it’s not science fiction. It’s science fact. In this case, this isn’t the government doing all this. It’s corporations. It’s companies that work to extract pharmaceutical gains and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, the government experimented on Tuskegee Airmen with syphilis to see how they would react to it. We put radiation into iron pills and gave them to pregnant mothers without them knowing about it to see what radiation would do to fetuses. So none of this is far-fetched. I just applied it to the Jason Voorhees origin story. It seemed like a very natural place to go with this.
Now, I know that some fans will have their machetes out because they like Jason to be a revenant, mysterious, and supernatural. I grant them that, and that’s fine. I’ll take the slings and arrows. I took a swing, but I didn’t send him to Hell. I didn’t send him to space. I didn’t put him up against Carrie White — all things that people have done in this series. I took a much more grounded swing. Hopefully there’s still enough fan service and candy in there for fans like me. We’ve got direct recreations that are shot-for-shot from the movies that fans will hopefully appreciate and grant me a little bit of grace with Jason’s origin.
There’s a pretty resolute ending to this first season that kind of beautifully leads into what could be the first film. Did you view this as a “one and done” miniseries or do you have plans for where this could go next?
BCK: I designed this so that if nobody watches and Peacock decides to not make a second season then it will at least feel like a satisfying whole. At the same time, I know where season two goes. There are more stories to tell in Crystal Lake. We now know that Sackhead Jason is out in the world. Pam knows. I’m sure people in the town know. There are places to go and expand upon the town in sort of a Twin Peaks David Lynch style. These are great peripheral characters that are not really fully explored in the movies that we get the chance to explore more here, but can explore even further. I mean, come on. It’s Jersey in the mid-‘70s. There was a lot going on then and I’d like to bring some of it to Crystal Lake and see how Jason dispatches those people.
I think that’s great and you’re right. You could easily tell new stories that follow an adult Jason around where he’s having visions of Pamela or you could tackle this universe from a totally different perspective. There really is a lot of room to explore. So it’s encouraging to hear that you’ve kind of thought about what is next for it.
BCK: I’ve thought extensively on it. I know exactly what my diving off point for season two would be. And I have the general contours of a season. People just have to watch the first one and then maybe we’ll get the opportunity.
It’s wild to think that it’s been over 15 years since there’s been a newFriday the 13thmovie. Clearly, it’s a property that is still very much in demand. You’ve approached it through this serialized television approach. Would you be interested in working on a newFriday the 13thfilm?
BCK: I’d love it. I mean, I had discussions with the Jason Universe people about doing it. If that’s a possibility, then yeah, I would love to. I’m a little busy right now with Welcome to Derry season two. So I’m doing that, but I’ve obviously given a lot of thought to season two of this show. Movies are tricky because television, in many ways, belongs to the writer or the writer and producer. Movies, however, belong to the director. In this case, I think Jason Universe and the people who own the rights and stuff have a lot to say about how these movies are made. I was very fortunate with this. I’m a long-term fan. I had the novelizations of these movies. I know what the ostensible origin of Jason is in the Part II novelization. I know all the stuff that’s there. I know the comic books. I know what Betsy Palmer said about her character’s backstory. There’s a lot of stuff out there and I know all of it.
The nice thing about Peacock and A24 is that they said, “Oh, you’re a fan. You’re coming at this from a really pure place. You’re taking big swings, but you also want to give a certain amount of candy to the other fans in the audience. Go do what you’re going to do.” They really kind of left me alone to make the show that was in my heart and the show that I wanted to make. It’s a rare, rare thing in TV, but they let me do it. In movies, that never happens. If there’s an opportunity for me to make the movie version of Friday the 13th that I want to make with Hockey Mask Jason then I would do it in a heartbeat because I know what that would be. But it would take a lot of agreement and faith on certain people’s part.
Lastly, this is a franchise that is obviously very much known for its extravagant kills. I love what you’ve done with them in the show. The drill kill that Pamela pulls off is fantastic. Do you have a favorite kill from the franchise? And which of the kills inCrystal Lakeare you the most proud of?
BCK: Yeah, I have a few favorite kills in the franchise. Obviously, you know, one of my favorite kills in the franchise is the one that happens to Jason at the end of Part IV, where he slides down onto the machete, which is amazing. Obviously, he dies, but he comes back in Part VI. However, I also love the very famous kill where he slams the sleeping bag against the tree. And my understanding is that there’s an extended cut that’s even bloodier that didn’t end up in the movie. I haven’t seen it, but I’d love to. And of course, Jason X is an outlier in the canon, but that liquid nitrogen kill is just absolutely delightful. But there are so many kills. So many good ones.
In Crystal Lake, there are many kills that I love. The whole last 20 minutes of the pilot is a blast because it’s just one absurdity on top of another. The moment when Pamela ultimately loses her mind with Valerie — Grace’s mom — is just so cruel. She just picks up the meat tenderizer, whacks Valerie, and dislocates her jaw. It’s just hanging off her face and then she gets knocked into the fryer. That was a lot of fun.
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