This fall, the Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake will start streaming on Peacock. The show focuses on the origin stories for Pam Voorhees (Camp Crystal Lake’s cook who was also the killer in the first Friday the 13th film) and her son, Jason (who started out as a sweet boy before drowning in Crystal Lake and becoming the iconic hockey-mask-wielding killer we meet in later movies).

The franchise helped shape the slasher genre, and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane — whose previous credits include Fringe, It: Welcome to Derry, and the best show you’ve never seen, Warrior — said the prequel pays homage to the films while also being its own thing.

“We weren't making a Friday the 13th movie,” Kane said on a panel at a Los Angeles event hosted by NBCUniversal. “We were doing a story about the town and a prequel about Jason's mom, and it was really fresh snow. We could build it however we wanted.”

The road to creating Crystal Lake was a rocky one. A24 secured the rights after years of confusion over who owned the IP and began creating the prequel series for Peacock. The studio first hired Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Dust Bunny) to co-showrun with his Hannibal colleague, Jim Danger Gray. That whole endeavor fell apart, however, and Kane came on board.

While Fuller retains a “story by” credit on the series along with Kane, the show we’ll see in October is Kane’s concept. He told me after the panel that  “very little” was changed from his original pitch. “It was really all just built out,” he said. “I had a pretty unified vision of what I wanted it to be at a pretty early point.”

That pitch included some “paranoid conspiracy thriller” elements weaved into the origin story for both Pam and Jason. Kane shared that he came to the idea after considering a major theme of late-1970s/early-1980s America. “We mistrusted our institutions,” he told me. “That ultimately had to play into Jason and Pam’s origin. And what institution were they a part of, whether it be big business or something else? And how did that go wrong somehow?”

Within this context, Crystal Lake reveals a few Voorhees family secrets as it follows Pam’s transformation into the killer we see in the 1980 film. Linda Cardellini (DTF St. Louis, Dead to Me), who plays Pam on the series, said on the panel that Kane gave her character “a beautiful beginning and somewhere to go. There's an arc there — from somebody who means well and is trying to survive and doing the best that she can and fighting hard for things that she thinks are right, to somebody who then turns out to do all the wrong things.”

But while Crystal Lake is a different beast, it’s still clearly in the Friday the 13th universe. Because of this, many of those “wrong things” Pam does are… messy. In that vein, Cardellini said that “there were a lot of cleanups and redos” for certain gory scenes involving her character.

Kane also teased on the panel that Friday the 13th fans will not only enjoy lots of Easter eggs but also that Pam will go “full Friday the 13th” before the season’s end. “There are a series of kills that are everything the movies do, and, hopefully, it will satisfy the real hunt hack‑and‑slash fans, too… we build to it, but it's coming.”

All eight episodes of Crystal Lake will premiere on Peacock on October 15, 2026.