Obviously, that timeline doesn’t make sense. But nothing in Friday the 13th makes sense, and that’s part of the fun.
Over the 12 movies that make up the franchise, we’re given multiple images of what the young Jason looked like, we’ve seen him as a regular human and a zombie and some sort of demon worm. We’re told that he hates water, that he can move quickly through water. And we’ve seen him die time and again, even before he gets fully resurrected in Part VI.
However, the Crystal Lake trailer suggests that the events of the first few films actually do make a certain amount of sense. Cardellini plays Pamela not just as a woman driven mad by her son’s death, but as a woman who has been scorned by the town, who has always been an outsider, and who would do anything for her son. Moreover, she plays her as a woman who believes that her son still lives, no matter what she’s been told. So if both of those things are true… and if the son reappears and starts killing off towns people, townspeople who were never kind to Pamela in the first place? Well, it’s not hard to imagine her taking credit for things that Jason actually did.
While all that’s plausible, one hopes that Crystal Lake has more than continuity fixes in mind. Although the show goes straight to streaming on Peacock, it does come from A24, a distributor known for rich, psychological—okay, we’ll say it—elevated horror. And with an actress as accomplished as Cardellini in the lead (and given several episodes to develop her character, instead of the minutes of screen time allotted to Palmer) we’re likely to get a complex character study instead of just shocking scares.
Will Crystal Lake be able to deliver a coherent story and a full character portrait? We don’t know, but as long as we get some nasty kills in the process, we’ll be happy. This is Friday the 13th after all.
Crystal Lake streams on Peacock on October 15, 2026.
