Now it can be told. Asked whether the new Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake reveals why Jason Voorhees is so indestructible, showrunner/executive producer Brad Caleb Kane answers definitively, “Yes. A hundred percent.”
Since this exclusive interview took place during the NBC/Universal Television press day on the Universal Los Angeles lot before the series began streaming its eight-episode first season on Peacock on October 15, Kane doesn’t specify that poor Jason (played at age four by Kaiden Cullen and Theo Lonsdale, by Callum Vinson at age 12, and at full size by Jonathan Tison) was injected with cockroach DNA by the malevolent Bellflower Chemical organization. In reality, cockroaches recognize family members through chemical cues, so maybe that’s why grown Jason still recognizes Pam and doesn’t kill her.
Kane also doesn’t elaborate on the fact that Bellflower was likewise experimenting on Jason’s mother, Pamela (Linda Cardellini), without her knowledge or consent, nor does he discuss the depiction of little Grace Snell (Gwendolyn Sundstrom) as the primary killer of negligent camp counselors Claudette (Danielle Kotch) and Barry (Phoenix Parvenik).
However, Kane is happy to describe the thought process behind all these twists.
“There are 12 movies that people can watch of the Friday the 13th franchise. They can go back and watch hack ‘n’ slash, those great movies, as much as they want. I think if you’re making a Friday the 13th TV series, or a prequel like Crystal Lake, you have to not insult the fans by giving them more of the same. You have to give them something new, something fresh. You should take bold swings; you should trust the franchise fans with something a little bit new, while also paying homage to the old.”
“I’ve been doing this for a while,” Kane continues. “I co-ran It: Welcome to Derry [Season 1], I’m running Season 2 of Welcome to Derry, which we’re going to make, and I’ve worked on things where we’ve had to deviate from what’s just the written material or what exists and take big swings. And I believe in big swings. I believe something worth doing is worth doing spectacularly. Whether you fail or succeed, fail or succeed spectacularly.”
Have Kane’s experiences on It: Welcome to Derry factored into his work on Crystal Lake?
“Absolutely. I spent years working on Derry, whether it was in the writers’ room, building story, on set, so the world of horror, the world of period drama, period horror, it’s all very fresh. It made it easier to inhabit another horror franchise. I don’t know if I can think of specific reasons why, but I was in the right headspace.”
Bryan Fuller preceded Kane as showrunner on Crystal Lake and reportedly had a different take on the premise. “He was gone by the time we [Kane and his team] got here,” Kane relates. Nevertheless, sharp-eyed viewers may note that Fuller and Kane share story credit on the first episode, “Camp Crystal.”
“That was a WGA thing,” Kane states. A brief lesson on how the Writers Guild of America (WGA) assigns credits: if writers work as a team, they are credited with an ampersand “&”; if they write separately, as Fuller and Kane did here, an “and” is between their names.
While there was the 1987-1990 TV show Friday the 13th: The Series, apart from the title and the hockey mask seen in the opening credits, this had nothing to do with Jason, Pam, or the movies. Instead, it was about a shop that dealt in trying to retrieve cursed antiques.
TV series generally rely on recurring characters and their interactions. Because Friday the 13th’s main continuing character doesn’t speak and has relatively brief interactions with others (depending on how long it takes Jason to chase them down and kill them), making something that feels both like an actual TV series and recognizably Friday the 13th-related seems challenging.
Kane says he and the creative team met that challenge by making Pam and Jason Voorhees the show's centerpiece. “We’ll find out more about Bellflower, but we brought in beloved characters from the original movie and built them out, and made them real people with real arcs that you’ll watch over the season, like Dorf [Cameron Scoggins], who was really just a comedic blip in the first movie, and Ralph Neely [Nick Cordileone], who’s just Crazy Ralph in the first two movies and is dispatched pretty quickly. You build out the world, and you build it out lovingly and with great detail.” He continued:
“There’s a lot in the show that pays very specific homage. We build slowly to it, but fans at a certain point will recognize specific scenes and shots from their favorite Friday the 13th movies. We do it [in Episode 4] with Willow [Oona Roche] coming into town. We recreated the girl at the beginning of the first movie coming into town shot by shot in Blairstown, to pay homage to the movie and the franchise and the fans.”
Our introduction to 12-year-old Jason may surprise many viewers. He has physical abnormalities resulting from the experiments, but he is otherwise loving, sociable, and articulate.
“We wanted him to be recognizable as a sweet, ordinary boy with an extraordinary condition that, in the America of the early ‘70s, would be the subject of ridicule from his peers,” Kane explains, “which would only drive him closer emotionally to his mom. We wanted that bond to be visceral on the screen, so that when it’s wrenched from her, you feel her palpable pain and you go along with it.”
Kane continued, “So, we wanted the head to be recognizable as, ‘This is Jason,’ maybe not quite as alien as in the first movie, maybe a little more realistic of what a boy like this would be, certainly ‘other,’ but, at heart, just a regular boy. And Callum played it beautifully.”
Pam’s assertions that she can sense Jason while he’s presumed dead are authentic, Kane adds. “I wanted Pam to feel like, ‘I’d know if my son is truly dead or truly here, and I feel his presence.’ I think a mother knows, and I operated from that position when writing the show and writing the character. Linda and I discussed it a lot. She says, ‘Jason and I are joined at the heart.’ I think a lot of parents and their children are, especially parents of children who experienced extreme joint trauma.”
Given the precise nature of both the practical and CGI effects, actors interacting with the gore gags have to stand in the right posture and position. Cardellini has affirmed that working with the effects in the Scooby-Doo movies helped her handle the demands of Crystal Lake, but Kane says that wasn't a factor in her casting.
“I didn’t know that. We threw her in crazy situations every day, and she jumped in with both feet and was just unflappable. We put her in pools of blood, we threw her in a river, we did a lot of stuff. And the emotional roller-coaster she has to go on as an actress is exhausting, physically and emotionally draining, and we did it every day.”
Kane continued, “I love her performance in Scooby-Doo and her Velma has become iconic, and it obviously proves her comedy chops, which she proved many times before, but the reason that I wanted Linda and only Linda to play Pamela Voorhees was a feeling, was instinct. I’d be lying if I said it was anything else.”
Indeed, “Linda was the only one I wanted for Pam. If she had said no, I would have been crushed, and I don’t know if we would have made the same show. Linda is an actress who is effortlessly likable. You will go along with her whatever she does, I believe, and you have to go along with Pam on some pretty gnarly adventures, and you have to empathize with her. Linda makes that easy.”
As for the look of Crystal Lake in the ‘70s sequences, it obviously helped that the series was shot on location in and around Blairstown, New Jersey, where the original Friday the 13th was filmed. The show also flashes back to Bellflower-land in the ’50s and '60s.
Kane credits production designer Lester Cohen and costume designer Cristina Spiridakis for getting the details right. “They did brilliantly. We went through ‘70s movies; we went through a lot of examples of the period and influences that I had. They had a ball recreating it all. A lot of these places existed in Jersey that didn’t need to be transformed that much. But Lester did a lot of work in a lot of other places. I think the period is recreated beautifully, so I’m thrilled with the way it looks.”
There is already discussion of the possibility of Crystal Lake Season 2. “It doesn’t end as a limited series,” Kane points out. I think if Peacock decides it’s a limited series, I think it ends satisfyingly, but I already know what the second season is if they decide to pick it up. But knock on wood. I have a lot more Pam story to tell, and I have a really good team.”
When FANGORIA is mentioned, Kane’s face lights up. “My fave. I grew up reading that magazine.” For Fango fans, he promises with a laugh that Crystal Lake gets bloodier as it goes with both kills and body horror. “It goes full Fango all the way.”
For more Crystal Lake insights, pick up FANGORIA Vol. 2 Issue #33 on newsstands now.
