October 31st brought trick-or-treaters, house parties, and a bombshell of an announcement: an official Friday the 13th show made for NBC’s Peacock. The long-standing franchise has gone thirteen years without a single entry, resulting from numerous delayed projects and legal battles between the original creators, Sean Cunningham and Vince Miller. Now, a prequel series titled Crystal Lake is suddenly being made with Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller and the prolific studio A24.
Being dormant for such a long time means the series is due for a refresh. While other prolific series like Texas Chainsaw and Halloween have upwards of three separate timelines and continuities, Friday the 13th has largely followed a single premise: a boy drowns in the lake due to negligent camp staff and returns as a zombielike man to kill teenagers. Rinse and repeat; add some psychic powers or time travel, and you have a memorable franchise.
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However, due to the legal circumstances of the ownership of Jason Voorhees as a character, we’re faced with an important question: will we actually see Jason Voorhees in Crystal Lake?
Jason Wasn’t Always the Killer
Paramount Pictures
If you’re a fan of the Friday films, you likely already know this bit of trivia: Jason Voorhees didn’t actually become the iconic killer until the second film, and he didn’t even don the famous hockey mask until the third film.
Originally, the first Friday the 13th was directly inspired by the success of the first Halloween movie. It’s played more as a murder mystery than a violent viscera-fest, with a group of teenagers getting picked off one by one before the re-opening of Camp Crystal Lake. It’s ultimately revealed that the murderer was Pamela Voorhees, the original cook at Camp Crystal Lake, who sought to keep the camp from ever re-opening due to the negligent death of her son.
After her death via decapitation at the end of the film, she remains a presence throughout the rest of the series, either as a physical head or as a psychological motivation for Jason to keep upping the body count.
As much as fans would like to forget, there were two attempts at moving Jason out of the spotlight as the film series continued. The fifth entry, A New Beginning, opted to have a copycat killer take up the famous mask, with the only connection to the original Jason being the character of Tommy Jarvis. This was reflected in the mask, with blue highlights replacing the signature red streaks. However, a combination of fan backlash and commercial underperformance led to Jason being – quite literally – ripped out from the grave in the next entry, Jason Lives.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday was the other attempt to move beyond the hockey-masked killer by recanting just about everything that made Jason work initially. After featuring his most monstrous form yet, it’s revealed that Jason’s spirit can now possess people and continue his murder spree by having someone consume his heart. Only the act of possessing another Voorhees can fully revive him. Suffice it to say, it failed at the box office and remains a bizarre, forgotten step for the series.
What Bryan Fuller Has Said About the Prequel
Luckily, we have some good news regarding Jason’s potential appearance in Crystal Lake. In an interview with Fangoria, Fuller revealed that the series won’t be under too many restrictions. Aside from guaranteeing a high body count, he also confirmed that, because of Vince Miller and A24’s efforts, they can use “everything” from the Friday franchise, including the depths of Hell and the expanse of outer space. It’s a good sign that Jason will make an appearance, either as a child, a full-grown murder machine, or maybe even both.
Fuller’s wording was very specific, however. He went on to clarify that the prequel is more of a “pre-remake-uel,” implying that there may be some major changes to the continuity of the series. We may see Jason be radically changed from a simple, tragic monster to something with a little more depth. We may see a stronger emphasis on the character of Pamela Voorhees instead.
Either way, Fuller didn’t directly state that Jason wouldn’t make an appearance – rather, that we’d see “familiar manifestations of Jason.”
As nebulous a statement as that is, it could mean several things: it’s possible we could see Jason as a human being, traumatized by nearly drowning in the lake; we could see Jason make a return as a weird slug-monster that possesses people; we could see multiple people take up the iconic hockey mask in the same way as Scream’s Ghostface; frankly, it’s been so long that anything could possibly happen. Let’s just say this: if Jason doesn’t make an appearance, fans are going to be justifiably furious.
While we still have no official release date for Crystal Lake, we can only hope for the best. If Leatherface, of all slashers, can star in three separate remakes, surely Jason Voorhees deserves just one more shot in the streaming age.
