“Crystal Lake” first look: Linda Cardellini dives into Pam Voorhees’ origin for “Friday the 13th” prequel (exclusive)

Key Points

• Crystal Lake first looks reveals Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees in the Friday the 13th prequel series.

• The Emmy nominee talks her introduction to horror and exploring the origins of the original killer.

• “We wanted to see her unraveling,” showrunner Brad Caleb Kane tells EW.

Halloween is Linda Cardellini‘s favorite holiday. The DTF St. Louis Emmy nominee grew up in the 1980s, the heyday of slashers and horror. She would regularly throw spooky parties as a kid, followed by a scary movie marathon at night.

“I was one of the only girls who really loved scary movies when I was younger, and girls were not as much into it,” the actress recalls in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “So it would scare everybody and they would have a hard time sleeping, but it was really fun.”

And yet, up until fairly recently, Cardellini has only dabbled in the genre as an actor. The Curse of La Llorona (2019) became her entry point. Most of those decisions, she says, were happenstance.

“I just gravitated towards other things, probably, at the time, and then those people gravitated towards me,” the star of Freaks and Geeks, soon to be seen in a Bill Hader-directed horror film, posits. “Then as time went on, those roles started coming to me and they were these large, juicy, crazy, fun things to play.”

One such role was Pam Voorhees, mother to hockey-masked serial killer Jason Voorhees, as seen in EW’s exclusive first look at Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake (premiering Oct. 15).

The eight-episode drama, an A24 production for NBC’s Peacock streaming platform, went through creative shakeups before landing in the lap of showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, who has experience in the serialized horror prequel arena with HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry. Around the same age as Cardellini, Kane’s own upbringing entailed obsessing over Stephen King and maintaining his dog-eared novelizations of the Friday the 13th movies.

Cardellini heard rumblings that Kane & co. wanted to see her for Crystal Lake, which tells the origin story of the franchise’s original killer. “My biggest question was, Why?” she says. “What is it about me that made you think of me? It was just out of pure curiosity.”

The answer was Dead to Me, the critically adored Netflix series featuring Cardellini opposite Christina Applegate.

“She was the first and only name that came to me that I wanted,” Kane says. “When I came aboard the project and started writing the pilot, images of Dead to Me from Netflix came to me. I just couldn’t get those images out of my mind. And the person who was linking the Venn diagram between Dead to Me and Friday the 13th was very obviously Linda Cardellini. I could just see her doing all the things I wanted Pam to do.”

The 1980-set Friday the 13th was a whodunnit. Counselors reopen Camp Crystal Lake, despite its dark history, and slowly most of them are killed off in gruesome ways by a mysterious figure. The culprit turns out to be Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who sought revenge against the teens she blamed for not watching her son as he drowned in the lake in ’57.

Crystal Lake begins with the circumstances around that drowning and follows from there Pam’s descent into madness. Callum Vinson, dressed in pronounced makeup and prosthetics, plays a young Jason Voorhees with an enlarged head from hydrocephalus.

“She’s only in such a small fraction of the movies and there’s very little actually known about her, but she’s the inciting incident in some ways,” Cardellini comments. “She’s an important piece of the puzzle, but a relatively unknown one.”

“We wanted to dive into Pam’s psychology,” Kane adds. “We wanted to see her unraveling after [watching] the events of the movie that everybody knows. We wanted to see her relationship with Jason and what his death kicks off in her — her trying to find some sort of equilibrium in her life after the thing that ostensibly she lives for, her son, was taken away from her, and how all the people around her and the circumstances surrounding her make that impossible to do. So it’s really a character piece.”

If you follow the timeline of the franchise, Crystal Lake should take place in the ’50s. Kane, however, took more artistic liberties to set the show in the ’70s. “I wanted to touch on all the pop-culture artifacts that were tangential to the America from which these movies were born,” he says.

The ABC Afterschool Special, the era of the paranoid conspiracy thriller, the debut of The Feminine Mystique — “even the martial arts genre, which, if you grew up during that time, was basically a whole personality,” Kane notes — were all touchstones. Crystal Lake is also (pun intended) camp at times. The showrunner thinks of the series as “a mixtape of genre.”

“The tone is odd,” Cardellini responds. “It is many things at once, but it works as this fun ride. There’s some scene set in an outdoor carnival, and I feel like it’s almost that feel.”

The townspeople, many of whom fans will recognize, bring different colors to the show’s palette. Danielle Kotch and Phoenix Parnevik appear as Claudette and Barry, the two sexually active camp counselors who were the first to go under Pam’s blade in the original film. They are now “full-on characters in the TV series,” according to Kane.

Officer Dorf is another figure from Friday the 13th who arrives at the camp in search of “Crazy Ralph,” a local who’d often drink and ramble on about the town curse. Dorf is now played by Cameron Scoggins, and Ralph is played by Nick Cordileone.

New characters — like William Catlett as Officer Levon Brooks and Devin Kessler playing his journalist sister, Brianna — also factor in. Catlett’s Levon is a friend to Pam, Cardellini describes. “Is he also then a foe at some point? We don’t know,” she says. “That relationship was really informative because when they speak, there is a lot of history that you don’t see on screen that has happened before the series begins.”

“Everybody in this world is living in a different genre in their mind,” Kane says, “until they collide with the genre that Pam is in.” And in that regard, Kane clarifies Crystal Lake is “100 percent” still a slasher at heart.

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In one early scene, a horrified Pam stares into her bathroom mirror, covered head to toe in blood. The only part of her person not stained are the white circles around her eyes.

Coming back into horror after La Llorona, “I forgot that it is so demanding physically, whether it’s being covered in blood or running all night or fighting,” the actress reflects. “I would wake up in the morning and all my muscles were sore. I think I have a collection of pictures of all the different bruises I had all over my legs.”

Kane remembers watching the Friday the 13th movies on repeat as a kid. It’s clear he knows the canon backward and forward, able to whip out the deepest of lore off the cuff. “As a fan,” he says, “I’m trying to give fans — and particularly grown-up fans — the show that they would wanna see now.”

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