Before the Hockey Mask: Linda Cardellini and Brad Caleb Kane on the Making of Pam Voorhees in “Crystal Lake”

Long before a hockey mask became the face of horror, the first killer at Camp Crystal Lake was a grieving mother. Peacock’s Crystal Lake, a prequel to the Friday the 13th franchise, rewinds the clock to tell Pam Voorhees’ story, and all eight episodes arrive tomorrow, Thursday, October 15th, on Peacock. At NBCUniversal’s Backlot Press Day in August, star Linda Cardellini and creator/showrunner Brad Caleb Kane sat down to discuss bringing the franchise back after a nearly two-decade absence, and why they think fans are in for a ride.

In the series, single mother Pam Voorhees has been unable to shake her grief after her young, sickly son Jason drowned in the town lake almost a year earlier. When two strangers arrive at her door digging into her past, a disturbing chain of events is set into motion, leaving the townspeople wondering just who Pam Voorhees really is.

For Kane, whose credits include It: Welcome to Derry and Tokyo Vice, Crystal Lake is personal. He has been a Friday the 13th fan since childhood, and he described reviving the long-dormant franchise as “thrilling and terrifying.”

“I grew up with the franchise,” Kane said. “I’ve seen almost every one of these movies in theaters first run. The first one I saw was in 1982, the summer of ’82. I saw Friday the 13th Part III in 3D. It blew my mind. It opened my eyes to the gateway drug to the wider world of film genre. The horror genre became the thing that I measured everything that I did by.”

Cardellini shared the mixed emotions. “It’s a well-loved franchise,” she said. “So entering into that is exciting and also daunting.”

Kane stressed that the fandom ran deep throughout the production. “Everybody that was involved with the show – myself, Linda, Dave Presto, who is our special effects makeup person, everybody – are longtime fans and made the show, crafted it lovingly and with hopefully great respect for the fans.”

The biggest creative hurdle, Kane explained, was the set of expectations that comes with the Friday the 13th name. His solution was to remember that he wasn’t making one of the movies.

“People know what to expect from a Friday the 13th,” Kane said. “Teens go out to a place, they are having sex and doing drugs, and then they are hunted by Mrs. Voorhees, or Jason in the subsequent films, or Roy in No. 5 for those die-hards. But, thankfully, we weren’t making a Friday the 13th movie… This was called Crystal Lake, and we were doing a story about the town and a prequel about Jason’s mom, and it was really fresh snow. We could build it however we wanted.”

That freedom let Kane make the show he wanted to see as an adult fan. “I thrilled watching them with thousand-seaters full of people yelling at the screen,” he said. “But I also grew up a little bit and became interested in other films and other themes in films, and I wanted to bring all of that cinema love to my love for Friday the 13th.”

He also promised that die-hards will be rewarded, especially in the back half of the season. “I wanted also to honor the fans of those original movies, and myself as an original fan of those movies, by giving as many Easter eggs as made sense within the context of this story,” Kane said. “There’s even more beyond Episode 4… We do more than give you Easter eggs going into five and six. We re-create things, which I won’t spoil here.”

“We all know where Pam ends up because she starts all of the killing in the first movie,” Cardellini explained about her role. “So I think what Brad gave me was a beautiful beginning and somewhere to go. There’s an arc there from somebody who means well and is trying to survive and doing the best that she can and fighting hard for things that she thinks are right, to somebody who then turns out to do all the wrong things… So I think that descent is very necessary.”

Fresh off of No Good Deed and DTF St. Louis, Cardellini said the chance to play the mother behind one of horror’s most famous killers was something she couldn’t pass up. “Here’s a franchise built on a man in a hockey mask, but it actually started with his mother,” she said. “I thought that was a really interesting thing… I thought, ‘Well, I’ve never done that before. I’d like to try that.’”

Betsy Palmer’s turn as Mrs. Voorhees in the 1980 original remains iconic, and Cardellini said she embraced the spirit of that performance without trying to copy it. “You can’t duplicate what Betsy did, but what she did is play this devoted mother, and so, for that, I can take that and bring that to the early childhood years of Jason’s life,” Cardellini said. “I also think that you don’t get to where Betsy is without really truly loving Jason and getting to know him. So that was really important to us, too, going in.”

The team even considered matching Palmer’s look. “We toyed around with the idea of the short hair, but we figured she has ten years to get there,” Cardellini revealed. Eagle-eyed fans should still watch Pam’s wardrobe, though. “I do a little bit of an homage to a certain sweater.”

Crystal Lake is the first Friday the 13th project to return to Blairstown, New Jersey, where the original film was shot, and Kane said that was no accident. “It was a deliberate choice to go back there and do exteriors in Blairstown, absolutely, and that’s one of the Easter eggs we wanted to give to the die-hard fans,” he said. “It’s like mecca for Friday the 13th fans. Fans make pilgrimages to Blairstown, New Jersey… It feels frozen in time. It hasn’t changed, really, very much in 45 years.”

The town hasn’t forgotten its claim to fame, either. “I stopped and got a coffee,” Cardellini recalled, “and inside the diner, it was completely decorated full of Jason and Friday the 13th.

With horror enjoying one of its strongest runs in Hollywood, Kane drew a line between today and the slasher boom of the late ’70s and early ’80s, when audiences were navigating economic malaise and mistrust in institutions. “It’s a release valve,” Kane said. “People are wound pretty tightly… People wanted an escape, and people wanted a thrill at the misfortunes of others as opposed to their own. It’s just fun.”

For Cardellini, it’s about the adrenaline and the shared experience. “You feel very present when you are watching horror because you are scared and you are involved,” she said. And she believes Crystal Lake delivers on that front. “When I see our show, it really does operate with these ups and downs and these wild moments and these beautiful colors and music, and I think it’s just sort of a feast for the senses.”

Viewers who start with a slow-burn mystery shouldn’t worry that the slasher DNA is missing. According to Kane, it’s all coming. “Pam goes full Friday the 13th in this season, and you will see it. And there are a series of kills that are everything the movies do… We build to it, but it’s coming.”

Cardellini, meanwhile, pointed to the end of the premiere as a favorite, a nearly wordless sequence that gives viewers an early look at the woman Pam will become. “She doesn’t really speak anymore in the last, like, 15 minutes,” Cardellini said. “It’s just a fight sequence with me and the two men that show up at the door… It was really physical and really fun, and I think her rage really starts to show through, and you get a glimpse of who she will be throughout the series in those moments. And there’s a moment where I am, postmortem, beating a body that I just feel is very Pam’s rage.”

All eight episodes of Crystal Lake premiere Thursday, October 15th on Peacock.