Ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma. It may be Sunday the 13th, but we'll take it.
After leaking online over the weekend, the first full trailer for Peacock's Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, has been officially released along with a new poster featuring Pamela Voorhees and her "special boy."
The trailer introduces Pamela (Linda Cardellini), who witnesses her badly deformed son Jason drowning (or appearing to drown) and sets out to exact bloody revenge on the teens who were supposed to be watching him.
We had been led to believe that Pamela would be handling the killing duties alone, but this teaser features a quick glimpse of what looks a lot like "Sackhead" Jason (the character didn't actually don the iconic hockey mask until Friday the 13th Part 3) running through the forest. There are also another couple of shots of a young Jason in the background.
Will we see an adult Jason pick up a machete/pickaxe in this first season? It certainly appears so.
That line about "what the good people of Crystal Lake would say if they knew who you and Jason really were" and the shot of the yellow door have led to speculation that Jason may turn out to be some kind of failed Government super-weapon. Jason is traditionally depicted as a supernatural "zombie," but the expanded universe leans into genetic experimentation as an explanation for his apparent inability to be killed.
During an interview with Empire, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane revealed that the series takes place eight years before the events of the first Friday movie.
“Pam is a cook at Camp Crystal Lake, Jason is an eleven-year-old camper participating in all activities despite his physical limitations, and his mom is absolutely intent on making sure he has a normal summer outdoors with other kids… but with ultimately tragic consequences," says Kane. "Things take some twists and turns on the way to Pam’s total psychotic break and subsequent bloody rampage.".
Check out the poster and trailer below, along with a new still of Pamela via Empire.
After spending over 15 years lying dormant at the bottom of a lake because of complicated rights issues tied to the character, the news broke last year that Jason Voorhees was finally set to return to terrorise a new group of teenage camp counsellors.
This take on Pamela Voorhees is described as "a mother who had given up a singing career to raise a special needs child and takes a dark turn when she loses her son."
Chucky and Long Bright River star Callum Vinson will play Jason as a child, and the cast also includes Nick Cordileone (Warrior), Joy Suprano (Fleishman is in Trouble), Danielle Kotch (Director’s Cut), and Phoenix Parnevik (Bel-Air) as future Voorhees victims Ralph, Rita, Claudette, and Barry.
"In many ways, it's a psychological thriller," Kane said in a recent interview. "It's a paranoid '70s thriller. 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."
"[Friday the 13th] out of the paranoid '70s thriller era. It came out of the mistrust-of-institutions era. It came out of the women's lib era, the National Organization for Women era, this consciousness-raising awakening era in America. I wanted to go and play with all of those themes," he added. "[Cardellini is] gonna shock and surprise a lot of people."