For the most part, the latest trailer for the Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake tells us what we already knew. Set in 1971, the series stars Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, a few years after her son Jason drowned to death at Camp Crystal Lake, but a few years before she started killing counselors who tried to reopen the camp in 1980. Along the way, we get looks at important characters, such as Nick Cordileone as local cook Crazy Ralph and William Catlett as Levon Brooks, the beleaguered town sheriff.But the real interesting part of the trailer comes with the reveal of the plot. Turns out, Pamela does not leave Crystal Lake because she hasn’t stopped looking for her son. She believes that he’s still alive—somewhere, somehow. Anyone who has seen a Friday the 13th movie knows that Pamela’s right. But Crystal Lake might finally show us how right she was.Friday the 13th has never been a series invested in the idea of continuity. The first movie came into existence because producer and director Sean S. Cunningham wanted to copy the success of 1978’s Halloween, telling a cheap slasher story built around a holiday. Writer Victor Miller came up with a whodunnit story, making people think that Jason had come back to the dead, only to reveal that the kills were done by his mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});However, when special effects artist Tom Savini pitched the idea of doing a shock ending like the one in Carrie, the makers of Friday the 13th added a sting, in which Jason emerges from the water to attack final girl Alice. Then, after the first movie made a ton of money, Friday the 13th Part II hit theaters in 1981, which begins with Jason, alive and well, killing Alice in revenge for her killing his mom… who was getting revenge on Camp Crystal Lake for killing Jason… who actually isn’t dead.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.The post A24’s Crystal Lake Trailer Promises to Solve the Biggest Friday the 13th Mystery appeared first on Den of Geek.