Friday the 13th Series Crystal Lake Is Everything Wrong With Film-to-TV Adaptations

Linda Cardellini in Crystal Lake —Peacock Friday the 13th is proof that a movie need not be a cinematic masterpiece to become a franchise-fueling horror classic.

Sean S.

Cunningham’s low-budget 1980 film brought the teen-slasher thrills of Halloween to a summer camp preparing to reopen years after two counselors were murdered there.

Its plot was skeletal and its performances workmanlike.

The attitude it implied toward sex and drugs was as hysterical as any “Just Say No”-era afterschool special.

Yet the movie was also viscerally effective, cycling through the sensations of suspense, titillation, and terror so quickly that, for its hormone-addled young audience in particular, it was impossible to look away.

Say what you will about Friday the 13th ; it’s not boring.

So it’s extra disappointing that Crystal Lake , an eight-episode Peacock horror series that reboots the franchise around the mother of victim turned bogeyman Jason Voorhees, is such a slog.

Four years in the making, it emerges from a development morass involving the departure of original showrunner Bryan Fuller (who had previously reinvented The Silence of the Lambs franchise in his stylish cult crime drama Hannibal ) over creative differences with production company A24 .

Brad Caleb Kane, whose credits include quality shows like Lodge 49 and Tokyo Vice along with It: Welcome to Derry , replaced Fuller, who retains a story credit, in 2024.

This might help to explain why the series, premiering Oct.

15, turned out to be such a convoluted, dull, incoherent, ultimately pointless mess.

Whatever the reason, it epitomizes everything wrong with the TV adaptations of horror touchstones that IP-crazed streamers keep churning out.

Crystal Lake —Matt Infante—Peacock Jason’s mom, Pamela, is the villain of the original movie, where she’s played by Betsy Palmer, though at that point in the franchise she’s identified only as “Mrs.