Sharpen your machetes, grab your hockey masks, and get ready to dive back into Crystal Lake because Peacock has just announced a Friday the 13th prequel series!
The series will be showrun by Bryan Fuller (Star Trek: Discovery, American Gods) and produced by A24. This is especially interesting as, while A24 is a major player in modern horror, it’s only recently gotten into the business of franchises with X (2022) and its prequel Pearl (2022), which premiered this year. This would be one of the first pre-existing franchises the studio has worked with.
This will also be the first new content for the series in years, as the Friday the 13th franchise had been caught up in a legal battle between the original writer (Victor Miller) and original producer (Sean Cunningham) until recently. The decision ultimately awarded the original movie’s domestic rights to Miller and the rest to Cunningham, meaning the two will likely be involved in the project in some way.
The series is being called an “extended prequel,” according to Variety, giving me Bates Motel vibes, which I am all for. Pamela Voorhees is one of my favorite horror movie antagonists, and there’s so much you can do with her and/or young Jason, especially given she was a teen mom in a small New Jersey town. This era has been shown in comics and fan films, but Jason’s childhood has mostly been left unexplored apart from a few monologues and a nightmare sequence in Freddy vs. Jason (2003). There’s still a lot of ambiguity over who his father is and the circumstances of his birth, with different parts of the franchise having different explanations.
There’s also a host of directions you can go with both Pamela and Jason, as the series goes back and forth on how supernatural Jason is. Jason Goes to Hell went so far as to imply Pamela used the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis to resurrect her son after he drowned. It also helps that you have 12 years with Jason alive and then twenty-two years between his drowning and the events of the first movie, meaning there’s a lot to work with.
What would you like to see done with the series? Comment below!
(featured image: Paramount/New Line Cinema)
