Jason Voorhees returns in 2026 in a new A24 and Peacock series, though not as the usual slasher. Crystal Lake, a prequel from A24 and Peacock, begins with Jason’s death as a boy and traces its impact on his mother, Pamela Voorhees, as she approaches a breaking point. The show takes its title from the lake where Jason drowned before returning as a monster.
Instead of focusing only on Jason’s beginnings, the series also follows Pamela as grief gives way to violence. Linda Cardellini plays her as a woman transformed by loss. At the same time, the show has to work around franchise conventions and legal disputes that have kept Jason off the big screen.
Jason last appeared in a horror movie in 2009. By that point, he had largely become a Flanderized character in entertaining cash grabs such as Jason X and Freddy vs. Jason. The earlier films weren’t particularly deep, but they did show a little more imagination than “Jason goes to space.”
The 2009 reboot, titled simply Friday the 13th, set out to restart the franchise. It failed miserably, in the reviewer’s view, even though it made a killing at the box office, and the series then sat dormant for more than a decade. Since its release, Hollywood has had trouble bringing Jason back to theaters, largely because of complicated rights covering both the character and his iconic hockey mask.
The mask is absent from Crystal Lake for legal reasons. The series instead adds a host of plot twists and hidden histories meant to show how Jason became Jason and how Pamela became the killer in the original Friday the 13th, a 46-year-old movie. Some of these additions are entertaining, while others could strike Jason Voorhees’ most devoted fans as sacrilegious. There’s so much new information that it can be difficult to follow.
The reviewer sees the question of whether the show should exist as beside the point. Its existence comes down to IP management, copyright expiration dates, streaming services’ need for a steady flow of content to keep subscribers from leaving, and capitalism. Those aren’t especially good reasons to make a series. Even so, the reviewer considers Crystal Lake pretty decent for viewers willing to put those broader objections aside for a few hours and go along with it.
The show’s path to production helps explain why those concerns remain present while watching. Crystal Lake was first announced in 2022, with Bryan Fuller, whose credits include Hannibal and Pushing Daisies, set to serve as showrunner. Fuller said in interviews that shifting the franchise from film to streaming had essentially freed him from the complicated rights issues that had held Jason Voorhees back.
Fuller was dismissed in 2024, with reports saying A24 wanted to take the story in another direction. A few months later, Brad Caleb Kane took over as showrunner. Kane is best known as the lead male singing voice in Disney’s animated Aladdin movies. Linda Cardellini, whose credits include Freaks and Geeks, joined the cast as Pamela Voorhees in 2025.
The reviewer lays out this production history to show the amount of work involved in completing the series and bringing the Friday the 13th IP back. Kane does his best to tell the story his way, they write, but the production’s complications often pull him into the mess, like a camp counselor caught in Jason’s grasp.
Crystal Lake opens on the day Jason dies, shifting the date from 1957 to 1971. Callum Vinson plays young Jason, wearing prosthetics that create a bulging, bald head modeled on the frightening look from the original film’s final scene. The death itself follows the expected pattern: Jason drowns while the counselors assigned to watch him are having sex in a supply shed. Pamela, a single mother who lived with her son and worked as the camp cook, is quickly overcome by grief and trauma.
The story then branches out. Flashbacks and exposition gradually reveal Pamela and Jason’s lives before they came to Crystal Lake; in the present, Pamela grows more erratic and violent. The town and its residents also give the series a chance to depict small-town America in the 1970s, while introducing people Pamela, and perhaps Jason, might kill in cold blood.
Crystal Lake’s town could come from a Stephen King story, so comparisons with Welcome to Derry are hard to miss. Both are prequels to iconic horror movies, and each episode in both shows includes a vivid burst of ghoulish violence to draw viewers back. In Crystal Lake, Pamela often supplies that violence by killing people who threaten her or stand in her way. She becomes a villain well before she stalks the teenage workers at the summer camp where Jason died.
Cardellini makes Pamela’s change feel convincing, the reviewer writes, while keeping her sympathetic even as she kills innocent people. The reviewer describes her as “the most sympathetic serial killer you’ve ever seen” and says it’s impossible to hate her.
The series takes its biggest risks, and may prove most divisive with horror fans, when it adds to Pamela and Jason’s past. It creates an original story to tackle some of the biggest unanswered questions in Friday the 13th history, particularly the question of what Jason’s “entire deal” is. The reviewer finds the answers intriguing, though at times arbitrary, closer to fan fiction than a definitive origin story. One episode, filmed by Kane in the style of a David Cronenberg thriller, stands out and is likely to amaze and offend viewers in equal measure.
For anyone interested in why Jason became Jason and why Pamela snapped and killed those teens, the reviewer finds Crystal Lake an entertaining effort to answer those questions. Viewers who object to the prequel may eventually see its continuity erased: another Friday the 13th reboot could wipe the slate clean in another decade or so, if Hollywood can resolve the franchise’s complicated copyright issues.
All eight episodes of Crystal Lake are scheduled to arrive on Peacock on Oct. 15.
