So it’s extra disappointing that Crystal Lake, an eight-episode Peacock horror series that reboots the franchise around the mother of victim turned bogeyman Jason Voorhees, is such a slog. Four years in the making, it emerges from a development morass involving the departure of original showrunner Bryan Fuller (who had previously reinvented The Silence of the Lambs franchise in his stylish cult crime drama Hannibal) over creative differences with production company A24. Brad Caleb Kane, whose credits include quality shows like Lodge 49 and Tokyo Vice along with It: Welcome to Derry, replaced Fuller, who retains a story credit, in 2024. This might help to explain why the series, premiering Oct. 15, turned out to be such a convoluted, dull, incoherent, ultimately pointless mess. Whatever the reason, it epitomizes everything wrong with the TV adaptations of horror touchstones that IP-crazed streamers keep churning out.
Crystal Lake —Matt Infante—PeacockThe series’ version of Pam is a single mother in early-’70s Crystal Lake, NJ, the small town where the eponymous camp is located. Played by Linda Cardellini, whose casting as a woman who’s equal parts loving and driven by repressed rage is Crystal Lake’s one stroke of genius, she cooks at the camp and the local school by day and cares for Jason by night. Her boy is a sweet preteen who has physical differences (his head is large, bald, and lumpy) and is prone to seizures. Fiercely protective, she enrolls him in Camp Crystal Lake in order to keep him close by, even though the cruel campers ostracize him. But Pam’s helicopter parenting backfires when he disappears in the lake as the two counselors who are supposed to be supervising, Claudette (Danielle Kotch) and Barry (Phoenix Parnevik), sneak off to snog. Jason’s only friend, an empathetic fellow outcast named Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), stumbles upon the couple and freezes, transfixed. By the time Pam realizes something is wrong, Jason has vanished.
Linda Cardellini, left, and Gwendolyn Sundstrom in Crystal Lake —Matt Infante—PeacockThe series plods forward from there, punctuated by some mild scares and semi-inventive kills, generating lots of clutter but negligible momentum. Kane dutifully remixes memorable aspects of the franchise—the snake in the cabin, the sex and drug panic, the trap-door endings. The ‘70s setting is exploited for side plots, from the trendy encounter group to which Pam accompanies liberated diner denizen Rita (a fun but underused Joy Suprano) to an itinerant band of Central Casting hippies, that mostly serve as time wasters. Clichés are nested within clichés; a prototypical penultimate flashback episode takes us back to the ’50s, where every nightmare of suburban womanhood is on display. Crystal Lake invokes various themes, some latent in the movies and some not: small-town racism, fear of difference, corporate cruelty, the strain of sexism that underestimates the anger of a woman like Pam at everyone’s peril. Yet its engagement with these societal ills rarely goes deeper than the acknowledgment that they exist.
William Catlett in Crystal Lake —Matt Infante—PeacockThere’s no context in which Crystal Lake would’ve been satisfying. Like too many horror series (Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, Hemlock Grove), it stretches a feature’s share of plot into a season that feels interminable. And like too many horror series adapted movie franchises (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Purge, Scream), it tries to extend a premise that was never especially rich in its original incarnation and has since been exhausted by endless sequels. But Crystal Lake suffers especially from its poor timing, premiering just a few months after Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a brilliant meditation on how the sex and violence of Friday the 13th and its ilk shoot straight to the subconsciouses of fans who encounter them while still young enough to be figuring out who they are, what turns them on, and what scares them senseless. Schoenbrun understands something crucial that seems to have eluded Kane: It isn’t the characters or the setting or even the creativity of the bludgeonings that make a slasher movie indelible. It’s the way they make us all into Grace, forever changed by a voyeuristic spectacle we may not understand but can never un-see.
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