Peacock
This article contains spoilers for "Crystal Lake" Season 1.
After a long wait, "Crystal Lake" Season 1 is finally here. The Peacock series didn't have an easy road to release. The "Friday the 13th" prequel lost showrunner Bryan Fuller in May 2024, with Brad Caleb Kane ("It: Welcome to Derry") eventually taking over. Kane's version pulls back the curtain on the Voorhees family, filling in a lot of gaps in Jason's past, as well as his mother Pamela's. That includes adding some context to a key location from the movies.
The series follows single mother Pam Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) who is grieving after her young son Jason drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. In the aftermath of the incident, strangers arrive at Pam's door digging into her past, setting off a disturbing chain of events. The show takes place mostly in 1972, eight years before the events of the original 1980 slasher classic, which saw Pam killing would-be camp counselors as a means of vengeance on behalf of her son, Jason.
Pam is beheaded at the end of "Friday the 13th," with Jason becoming the killer in subsequent entries. That begins with 1981's "Friday the 13th Part 2," which isn't one of the four "Friday the 13th" movies that takes place on the correct date. That aside, we see that Jason is all grown up and has been hanging his hat in a dilapidated shack in the woods near Camp Crystal Lake. This shack, it turns out, wasn't some random home Jason made for himself.
Instead, the show heavily implies that this shack actually had some importance to Jason from when he was a boy, long before he drowned in the lake and long before the murders began.
Jason's shack near Camp Crystal Lake has long been shrouded in mystery
Paramount Pictures
In "Crystal Lake" Season 1, we learn that Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom) was pretty much the only person in town who was ever kind to Jason (Callum Vinson). In Episode 6, entitled "Kill Them, Mommy," it's explained by Grace to Pam that she and Jason had a little place in the woods that they would visit from time to time. Pam then takes a trek there herself, discovering an abandoned cabin in the woods.
In the show, it's in much better shape but this is in 1972. When we see Jason's shack in "Friday the 13th Part 2," it's 1981, nearly a decade later. The show doesn't explicitly say that this is the dwelling that becomes Jason's shack. The implication is that Jason made a home of it and did his best to keep it up over the years. That involved some poor craftsmanship on his part, but it's not like he had any meaningful construction skills.
The above photos showcase the shack in all of its glory and it's not hard to imagine the shack Pam visits becoming this pieced-together mess over the course of a decade.
"Part 2" features some of the best kills in the "Friday the 13th" movies but it also deepens our understanding of the bond between Jason and his mother. The climax takes place largely at Jason's shack, where he's built a shrine to Pam, complete with her severed head. "Crystal Lake" provides even more meaning to the shack and why it was such a focal point of the franchise's first sequel. It adds some real context to something that has long been shrouded in mystery, at least for hardcore fans. For casual viewers, it was just a weird shack that a killer lived in.
"Crystal Lake" is streaming now on Peacock.
English (US) ·