Emmy Winner Steals This Horror Show as Slasher Villain’s Mom

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Peacock Hockey-masked marauder Jason Voorhees long ago shifted from scary fiend to pop-culture punchline, thanks to a slasher series that grew goofier with each ludicrous, monotonous installment.

So it’s almost impossible to get worked up about the origin-story reconfiguration in Crystal Lake , an eight-episode prequel about the events leading up to the first Friday the 13 th film.

Akin to Bates Motel for the counselor-slaying icon and his unhinged mother, it’s a return to Camp Crystal Lake, whose gleeful, self-conscious absurdity fits a franchise defined by daffiness.

Crystal Lake (streaming Oct.

15 on Peacock) refrains from outright winking at its audience, but with every bit of over-the-top silliness, it makes clear that its tongue is in its cheek.

That’s the ideal tone for such an endeavor, given that there’s nothing serious about Jason Voorhees’ big-screen features, whose outlandishness was so pronounced that, by the end, they seemed designed to garner as many laughs as screams.

The same is true of Brad Caleb Kane’s show, whose focus isn’t really Jason; it’s his mom Pamela (Linda Cardellini, fresh off her first-ever Emmy Award for HBO’s DTF St.

Louis ), who works as the cook at rural New Jersey’s Camp Crystal Lake.

When she’s not making meals for the kids, she dotes on her son Jason (Callum Vinson), a young, deformed boy with a misshapen cranium and mouth that make him a target for ridicule from his fellow campers.

In no time flat, Jason—per the character’s lore—drowns in the camp’s lake, while his sole friend, Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), covertly spies on his counselor, Claudette (Danielle Kotch), shirking her duties by running off to a shack to screw her boyfriend, Barry (Phoenix Parnevik).

Crystal Lake leans into the films’ horndog energy as well as their fondness for gratuitous goriness, and its ‘70s-era soundtrack­­—Kane relocates the action from 1957-1958 to 1972—is similarly in tune with its predecessors’ atmosphere.

So too is Cardellini’s lunatic performance as Pamela, who’s introduced covered in blood in a bathroom (“What did you do?” she asks herself in the mirror) and whose grief over her child’s death is consuming to the point of creepiness.

In an early flashback, Pamela surprises Jason with a package full of camping goodies that includes a machete, which he promptly holds over his head, proclaiming, “These are my woods!” as his amused mom states, “You look like a crazy person.” Such is the knowing ridiculousness of Crystal Lake , whose protagonist, nine months after her boy’s untimely demise, can’t stop staring out at the lake, convinced that Jason (whose body hasn’t been recovered) is still out there.