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Viewers combing the Crystal Lake trailer found a yellow door and built a theory on it: Jason Voorhees as a government project, a Stranger Things Eleven for Camp Blood. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane says the answer is the 1970s, not a laboratory. All eight episodes of the Friday the 13th prequel land on Peacock on Thursday, October 15.
“I don’t want people watching, thinking that we’re doing some sort of Stranger Things, Eleven, government super soldier,” Kane told Deadline. “It’s not that, it’s its own thing.” What the show is instead, he said, is period-specific: “It’s grounded in more reality. It’s grounded in things that were going on in the 60s and 70s that sort of intersect with the theme of mistrusting our institutions.”
The Era Is the Answer
Kane has been playing that note since last winter, when he described the series to Entertainment Weekly as a paranoid ’70s thriller with “all of the DNA of a slasher without quite being a slasher.” He has pointed at the 1980 film’s own context as his way into it, the mistrust-of-institutions era and the National Organization for Women era, and that is the register September’s full trailer plays in. A laboratory origin would cut against all of it.
Where the Yellow Door Leads
The theory is not ridiculous on its face, which is probably why it travelled. A prequel has to explain something, and a secret room is a cheap way to explain a lot. But the Jason of the 1980 film is not an experiment. He is a boy who drowned at a summer camp while the counselors were busy elsewhere, and the horror of him has always been negligence rather than conspiracy. Kane told Deadline he found the theorizing hard to tune out, and teased that the series does supply certain explanations. Grounded is not the same as unexplained.
The People Around Pamela
Linda Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees and Callum Vinson plays Jason, with William Catlett as Levon Brooks, Devin Kessler as Briana Brooks, Cameron Scoggins as Dorf and Gwendolyn Sundstrom as Grace. Kane created and wrote the series for A24 and Peacock, and the production took its town scenes back to Blairstown, New Jersey, the same streets Sean Cunningham used as Crystal Lake in 1980.
Victor Miller wrote that film and invented Pamela Voorhees, and he is credited as an executive producer here. He died on September 2 at 86, three weeks before Kane sat down to talk about what his character’s son really is.
Three weeks out, the campaign has shown a machete, a blue cable-knit sweater and a lake, and the origin has been the one thing held back. Kane has now said what it is not. Whether a Jason explained by the 1970s frightens anybody more than a Jason explained by a lab is the show’s own problem, and it has eight hours to solve it.