Image credit: Matt Infante/PEACOCKThe road back to Crystal Lake is officially open.
Peacock has released the official trailer, key art and new images for Crystal Lake, its upcoming Friday the 13th prequel series from A24. The eight-episode series premieres October 15, bringing audiences back to the infamous lake — but this time, the story begins before Jason Voorhees became one of horror’s most recognizable killers.
Linda Cardellini stars as Pamela “Pam” Voorhees, the mother whose story became the foundation of the Friday the 13th mythology.
Crystal Lake follows Pam as she struggles with the death of her young son Jason, who drowned in the lake nearly a year earlier. When two strangers arrive asking questions about her past, a disturbing chain of events begins to unfold around the community.
Rather than simply placing a younger Jason at the center of another slasher story, the series appears poised to explore Pamela and the circumstances surrounding the tragedy that ultimately became part of horror history.
Callum Vinson appears as young Jason Voorhees. The cast also includes William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins and Gwendolyn Sundstrom.
Brad Caleb Kane serves as creator, writer, showrunner and executive producer. Kane, whose credits include It: Welcome to Derry and Tokyo Vice, has described his approach to Crystal Lake as drawing heavily from the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s.
That influence could give the series a different identity from the films that followed.
While Crystal Lake retains the DNA of the slasher franchise, Kane has indicated that character, atmosphere, time and place are central to the story. For a franchise remembered largely for masks, machetes and elaborate kills, shifting the focus back to Pamela Voorhees provides an opportunity to examine how the legend began.
It is also territory the franchise has never explored at this scale.
Since the original Friday the 13th arrived in theaters in 1980, the series has expanded across numerous sequels and taken Jason far beyond Camp Crystal Lake. The new Peacock series instead turns the clock backward and returns to the place where everything started.
Crystal Lake consists of eight hour-long episodes produced by A24.
All eight episodes premiere Thursday, October 15, exclusively on Peacock.