The original Friday the 13th worked

Sean S.Cunningham's low-budget nineteen eighty film about a summer camp where two counselors were murdered became a horror classic despite skeletal plot and workmanlike performances.

“Say what you will about Friday the 13th; it's not boring.”

Crystal Lake is a slog

Crystal Lake, an eight-episode Peacock horror series rebooting the franchise around Jason Voorhees' mother, is convoluted, dull, incoherent and pointless. It epitomizes everything wrong with TV adaptations of horror touchstones that streamers keep churning out.

The show had a troubled production

Four years in the making, Crystal Lake emerged from a development morass involving the departure of original showrunner Bryan Fuller over creative differences with production company A twenty four.

Jason's mother was barely in the original

In the nineteen eighty Friday the 13th, Jason's mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, enters almost eighty percent of the way through and is dead a little over ten minutes later, her head macheted off…

The reboot reimagines Pam entirely

The series' Pam is a single mother in early nineteen seventies Crystal Lake, New Jersey, who cooks at the camp and local school by day and cares for Jason by night.

Jason drowns at camp

Pam enrolls her sweet preteen son, who has physical differences and is prone to seizures, at Camp Crystal Lake to keep him close.

Pam becomes a killer

Convinced her son is alive and angry the camp reopens the next year, Pam kills two thugs disguised as state troopers.

The plot becomes bloated and unfocused

The series plods forward with mild scares and semi-inventive kills, generating clutter but negligible momentum.

Themes are acknowledged but not explored

Crystal Lake invokes small-town racism, fear of difference, corporate cruelty and sexism. Yet its engagement with these societal ills rarely goes deeper than the acknowledgment that they exist.

The show stretches a thin premise

Like too many horror series, Crystal Lake stretches a feature's share of plot into a season that feels interminable.

It misses what made slashers work

Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, released months before Crystal Lake premiered October fifteenth, understands what Kane missed: it isn't characters or setting or creativity of violence that makes slashers 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.”