Even as a longtime fan of horror movies, and a Friday the 13th series apologist (which is practically its own personality type) I’ll admit that when the Voorhees family was announced as the center of a prestige TV project, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. A slasher story stretched across serialized episodes? And when the studio started teasing its newly minted "Jason Universe" with multi-project plans, I found myself even more confused. That’s a lot of runway for a franchise that once gave us a guy in a hockey mask punching heads off on a boat. But the creator of the upcoming Crystal Lake series admits the show is different from Friday the 13th in a key way, and his explanation still has me excited and ready to sign up for a Peacock subscription.
The team behind Crystal Lake is finally talking, and the pitch is starting to make sense. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, who also helped build HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, explained that the series isn’t actually trying to mimic the original films beat for beat. Instead, it’s reshaping the world around a tone that predates Jason’s hockey mask era entirely. As he told the outlet:
