All eight episodes of Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, are now streaming, and Peacock has released a series of spoiler-y new promo images.
The stills spotlight arguably the show's most gruesome kill, while also giving fans a first official look at the franchise's new Jason Voorhees, both as a child before his accident, and as the "grown-up" (you'll find an explanation below) killing machine that returns in the finale.
The iconic movie maniac doesn't don his signature hockey mask in this first season, but "Baghead" Jason is played by Jonathan Tison.
In episode 7, "Friday," we learn that a pregnant Pamela (Linda Cardellini) was an unwitting test subject for a government program and was given regular injections (cockroach DNA was one of the components) in an attempt to produce a new species of human that could survive a nuclear blast. We are told that this individual could potentially become stronger and experience accelerated growth in highly stressful situations.
This explains how Jason "drowns" as a child and returns just over a year later as a much larger killing machine in the finale, when he murders his father, Elias (guest star Hamish Linklater), before disappearing into the woods as his mother finally loses her last marble.
Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane explained the decision behind giving Jason this new origin during an interview with Games Radar.
"I mean, the canon itself is pretty inconsistent and pretty wonky, and there was no real origin set in stone. There were sort of certain things said in the movies, and then in the novelization for part two, they talk about Jason's interiority, and they talk about him crawling out of the lake, and surviving in the woods off of this and that. But when you marry it with the actual time period of the movies, it doesn't quite match up."
The writer-director adds: "So it felt like you could mash it around a little bit. It felt malleable, and it felt like fresh snow that we could play with and have some invention there. Nothing is consistent in the canon anyway, so why not go back and play with it at all?"
What do you make of this new backstory for Jason Voorhees? Let us know in the comments, and check out the images (via Dread Central) below.
"A prequel to the Friday the 13th franchise, Crystal Lake follows single mother Pam Voorhees, who has been unable to shake her grief after her young, sickly son Jason tragically drowned in the town lake almost a year before. When two strangers arrive at Pam’s door digging into her past, a disturbing chain of events are set into motion, leaving the townspeople of Crystal Lake wondering: just who is Pam Voorhees?"