Evil never dies, at least for long. Horror movies, as a genre, have been a support beam for Hollywood due to their cheaper budgets and the major box office returns that they can generate. This is also how you end up with decades-long franchises like the thirteen films in the Halloween series, the ten films across the Saw franchise, and even the six films in The Exorcist series (with a seventh on the way that might actually be good). In short, people love to get scared, and that’s why these franchises continue, not because of a grand narrative plan like the MCU.
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That said, this year marks the long-awaited return of the Friday the 13th franchise, with the slasher favorite stuck in a legal limbo that has left the world without a trip to Crystal Lake for seventeen years, as 2009’s feature film was the last chapter in the series. Now that the franchise is officially back from the dead, the first new story in the series in almost two decades is almost here, and it actually is one fans want to see. To celebrate our second Friday the 13th of the year, Peacock has released an actual first look at the upcoming Crystal Lake TV series, which already appears to have captured the franchise’s aesthetic.
Friday the 13th Returns with First Look at Crystal Lake TV Series
The upcoming Crystal Lake, the first TV series in the Friday the 13th franchise since the anthology series in the 1980s titled, you guessed it, Friday the 13th: The Series, has been in development for a few years now with several different creatives attached. One thing has remained the same across the changes that have occurred, which is that the series will function as a prequel to the Friday the 13th movies and tell the origin stories of Jason and Pamela Voorhees.
To that end, the first looks revealed by Peacock for Crystal Lake harken back to imagery from the first Friday the 13th film in ways that shouldn’t surprise longtime fans. One image features the titular crystal lake with its trademark fog floating above it, the second shows a pair of dead camp counselors that harkens back to the opening scene of the original Friday the 13th movie, and the third features a hand holding a knife, which looks quite reminiscent of Pamela from the first film, too.
Crystal Lake is confirmed to star Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother, showing a side of the character that has never been on the big screen. She’ll be joined by young actor Callum Vinson as her special boy, Jason. One of the secret weapons that Crystal Lake has working in its favor is the series showrunner, Brad Caleb Kane, who terrified audiences last year with another hit prequel TV show, IT: Welcome to Derry.
“In many ways, it’s a psychological thriller. It’s a paranoid ’70s thriller,” Kane previously revealed to EW about Crystal Lake. “It has all of the DNA of a slasher without quite being a slasher. There are rivers of blood in the show. There are very, I think, ingenious kill sequences and deaths and murders, but it’s all done in service of character and theme and place and time.”
No official release date has been given for when Crystal Lake will debut, but fans should know that 2026 has one more Friday the 13th on the calendar, waiting for us around the corner in February. One assumes that the series will time itself in some way to be released around that point on the calendar, but Peacock hasn’t confirmed it yet. Until then, we’ll have these images and patience on our side, but it’s nice that Friday the 13th is finally back after countless other horror franchsies have lapped it and been revived in its absence.
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