Jason Voorhees’ Return to Screens Receives a Killer Update From ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Boss

Whether we knew it or not, many of us first became obsessed with Brad Caleb Kane’s work when we watched Disney’s 1992 masterpiece, Aladdin, in which he performed the songs of the animated titular character. These days, he’s terrifying the socks off audiences everywhere thanks to his job as co-showrunner on HBO’s immensely popular and horrifying IT prequel series, IT: Welcome to Derry. And, while the title hasn’t landed an official Season 2 renewal, there’s plenty more genre work where that came from, as Kane is the creative responsible for bringing the Friday the 13thfranchise back to our screens with Peacock’s Crystal Lake. During a recent interview, Kane opened up about the project, which recently wrapped filming its debut season.

There’s a lot still up in the air about where the storyline will take us when Crystal Lake eventually lands on NBCUniversal’s steamer, but Kane happily filled in some of the blanks, revealing, “In many ways, it’s a psychological thriller. It’s a paranoid ‘70s thriller. It has all the DNA of a slasher without quite being a slasher.” Instead of picking up with the infamous Jason Voorhees following the events of the movie franchise, Crystal Lake will instead follow the will-be killer’s younger years with Chucky’s Callum Vinson in the role of the hockey mask-wearing slayer. It will also delve into the story of his relationship with his mother, Pamela Voorhees, with Dead to Me’s Linda Cardellini in the leading role as the stressed-out mom.

For those out there who might be concerned that the show won’t deliver because a child is playing Jason, Kane is here to soothe your worries. “There are rivers of blood in the show,” he said, “There are very, I think, ingenious kill sequences and deaths and murders, but it’s all done in service of character and theme and place and time.” Seeing as how Pam was the killer in the original Friday the 13th, we can absolutely expect mommy dearest to have some homicidal tendencies in the series.

‘Crystal Lake’ Will Echo the Times

Just as IT: Welcome to Derry has not only played into the horror of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, but also the tumult and murderous racism happening in the fictional town of Derry, Crystal Lake will do the same, with Kane adding,

“I tried to think about Crystal Lake and a Friday the 13th prequel as, ‘What era did the first movie come out of?’ It came out of the paranoid ‘70s thriller era. It came out of the mistrust-of-institutions era. It came out of the women’s lib era, the National Organization for Women era, this consciousness-raising awakening era in America. I wanted to go and play with all of those themes.”

As of right now, Crystal Lake has not set a release window, but stay tuned to Collider for more.