Sky has unleashed the official trailer for ‘Crystal Lake‘, the A24-produced prequel to the iconic ‘Friday the 13th’ franchise, which arrives on Sky and NOW in the UK and Ireland this October.
The eight-part horror series shifts the spotlight away from the hockey mask and machete, taking us back to the story of Pam Voorhees, played by Linda Cardellini (DTF St. Louis, Dead To Me), and the tragedy that ultimately helped create one of horror’s most infamous legends.
Pam is a single mother still struggling with the death of her young, sickly son Jason, who drowned in Crystal Lake almost a year earlier. When two strangers turn up at her door and begin digging into her past, it sets off a disturbing chain of events and leaves the local community asking a rather important question: just who exactly is Pam Voorhees?
For anyone whose knowledge of the franchise begins and ends with Jason Voorhees stomping around in a hockey mask, ‘Crystal Lake’ is heading back to where the whole bloody mess actually began. In the original 1980 ‘Friday the 13th’, Pamela Voorhees was the killer, taking revenge on the counsellors at Camp Crystal Lake after blaming their predecessors for Jason’s drowning. Jason himself did not properly take over slasher duties until ‘Friday the 13th Part 2’, while his now-iconic hockey mask arrived later in ‘Friday the 13th Part III’.
That makes Pam a particularly interesting character to build a prequel around. Rather than simply giving us a younger version of the unstoppable masked killer, the series has room to explore the grief, history and increasingly dark events surrounding the Voorhees family before Jason became the franchise’s headline attraction.
Alongside Cardellini, the series stars William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins and Gwendolyn Sundstrom.
‘Crystal Lake’ comes from creator, writer, executive producer and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, with A24 producing the series. Kane is joined by original ‘Friday the 13th’ writer Victor Miller and Horror, Inc. in bringing the wider Jason Universe back to the screen. Executive producers also include Marc Toberoff, Robert M. Barsamian, Robert P. Barsamian, Stuart Manashil, Tyson Bidner, Michael Lennox and Roy Lee.
With A24 behind the production and the story focusing on Pamela rather than immediately jumping to fully formed hockey-mask Jason, ‘Crystal Lake’ looks to be taking a slightly different route back into the franchise. Of course, given where all of this eventually ends up, peaceful lakeside family drama seems unlikely to remain on the agenda for very long.
‘Crystal Lake‘ Season 1 premieres October 2026 on Sky and NOW.
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