I can’t remember the last time a catch-up phone call with a confidante didn’t include one of us marveling that we haven’t caught an assault charge. If any law enforcement happens to be reading this, I want to make it clear that will never happen.
Well, let’s call it a non-zero chance. At the end of the day, I am a realist; anything can flip a person’s switch from off to blackout rage. However, I have decades of practice holding back my inner She-Hulk. So do most women.
Every day, we wake up in a nation controlled by a convicted felon accused of multiple sexual assaults, while a college student seeking justice after alleging she was gang-raped at a fraternity party is doxxed and swatted. We are not taken seriously in politics or at work. The manosphere has poisoned our water coolers and social media feeds.
Women have had it, including with each other. Aspiring tradwives and “Live, Laugh, Love” Karens selling out everyone else to keep up their manicures are legion. They threaten to run you down in crosswalks and refuse to bow out gracefully when told, for instance, that a pretty mechanical bird mounted on a boutique’s wall isn’t for sale.
Ladies, look to your left. Now look to your right. One of you is dying to knife somebody. Only Pamela Voorhees, brought to life by Linda Cardellini in “Crystal Lake,” has the guts to act on that impulse. Her bloodlust coats her skin in the crappy opening scene of this “Friday the 13th” prequel, after she’s dispensed with two goons who make the fatal blunder of invading her home and taunting her. One goes down with a swift nick to the jugular. The other loses half his face to the Voorhees family’s machete.
(©2025 Peacock TV LLC. All Rights Reserved.)
The thing is, by the time we’re assaulted by all that, we understand that Pamela has had it, too. She lost her gentle son, a boy born with hydrocephalus, a birth defect in the brain, who is endlessly bullied until he drowns at camp. The town moves from pitying her to whispering that she’s crazy, leaving her rutted in the anger stage of the grieving process. As she chops away at the men who attack her, I found myself muttering, “Yes. Get him. Again. Again!”
Don’t confuse this for an endorsement. Please don’t. “Crystal Lake” is a barely watchable gorefest, with a plot riddled with more seeping holes than Pamela’s victims. (Of course, if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am not, I guess that counts as a recommendation.) What passes for story amounts to little more than a two-dimensional cartoon rendered in human-flesh puppetry, courtesy of actors capable of much better, Cardellini included.
Even so, it’s kind of great to watch one of TV’s most enjoyable performers massacre a gaggle of sex-crazed hippies, or knock an abusive parent into a deep fryer for stress relief. Few of us can claim to have never daydreamed about, say, an anvil dropping from the clouds to erase some menace from our lives, whether it’s an entitled relative or an idiot comedian. Jason Voorhees’ mom simply prefers a hands-on approach.
I understand why the many chefs who mucked up the “Crystal Lake” cauldron, starting with Bryan Fuller, were compelled to fill in the blanks of Pamela’s origin story. The beauty of the character, once her truth was revealed in the original 1980 movie, is her relative mystery. Who would suspect a frumpy matron in a humble sweater could wreak such unhinged havoc? Other women, that’s who. We’ve always suppressed murderous desires. (See: “Dateline,” “Snapped” and rest of the Oxygen channel’s true crime lineup.) Only recently have we taken to saying that out loud.
Long before the medical and pharmaceutical industries made perimenopausal rage fashionable, Pamela Voorhees was a genre outlier, especially in a cultural climate that had already started retreating from a decade of legislative gains for women’s rights.
Now, in this post-Roe v. Wade world of ours, feminine wrath must be mansplained to be taken seriously. While women have produced excellent recent examinations, including “Furious” and “East of Eden,” the brutal truth is that the “Friday the 13th” movies are IP recognizable to hockey-masked trick-or-treaters too young to watch them.
So it falls to “Crystal Lake” to tell most of us why the mother of slasher cinema’s patron saint was driven to kill, kill and kill again in the first place. But it also helps us understand why a crumpled sock in the middle of the living room or dirty dishes on the kitchen counter makes the exhausted woman in your life crash out.
Let’s assume that if you’re reading this far, you already know the first movie’s big twist: the real killer wasn’t Jason Voorhees, but his mad mama. If not, I mean, what gives? Did you see that picture of Cardellini and wonder what cool-as-a-cuke Lindsay Weir from “Freaks and Geeks” has been up to? With regret, I present this as your answer.
But as any old-school porn hounds skilled in fast-forwarding through “the plot” will tell you, there’s merit in skipping straight to the action — meaning, Pamela destroying fools with something more cutting than wit.
Maybe Fuller, the guy who classed up “Hannibal,” could have done something brilliant with Pamela. But he exited the project early due to creative differences, leaving “It: Welcome to Derry” showrunner Brad Caleb Kane to expand the legend of a woman whose motives were fairly basic. I mean, if your kid died because two horny teen counselors shirked their lifeguard duties to bone in a shed, you might harbor a few homicidal compulsions too.
Alas, in these days of milking dormant franchises for every drop of ichor, a simple explanation isn’t enough. Therefore – and this will either save you the trouble of enduring all eight episodes or spoil them – Pamela Voorhees is revealed to be a victim of a patriarchal industrial plot.
(©2025 Peacock TV LLC. All Rights Reserved.)
The former professional singer gets knocked up by her lover, Elias (Hamish Linklater), who works for a company called Bellflower. When she nearly miscarries, he convinces her to marry him and move to his company’s sponsored enclave that’s popping with pregnant women like her. Once she’s settled in, her husband plies her with Bellflower-manufactured TV dinners and happy pills, occasionally shuttling her to the doctor to be pumped full of mystery muck. Truly a MAHA conspiracist’s nightmare.
Sometime later, Jason arrives and demonstrates a knack for reviving from naps the average human wouldn’t wake up from. So father secretly subjects son to all manner of mad science, including massive radiation exposure. Once Pamela discovers this, she rescues Jason, turning the skull of the man who gets in her way into soup, and they escape to Crystal Lake.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.Sign up here
Cardellini’s Pamela Voorhees is what happens when women drinking from a bottomless well of contempt and human carelessness hit their limit. The writers, in their clumsy way, cater to that idea by having her dispose of her first slaughter by slathering the bodies in a deconstructed tonnato sauce of canned fish and honey, and standing by as a massive bear lumbers up to feast.
Before the animal takes a bite, it sizes up Pamela, sniffs her tears, and leaves her be. You could view this as one predator recognizing another. To women of a certain mood, though, it confirms what we already know: that a bear is preferable company to thoughtless, dangerous people. Plus, it’ll help rid you of pesky evidence without asking questions, which only a true, understanding friend would do.
All episodes of “Crystal Lake” are streaming on Peacock.
Read more
about this topic
