Crystal Lake's Best Twist Completely Rewrites Friday The 13th's Opening Scene

Published Oct 20, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

This article includes SPOILERS for Crystal Lake.

While Peacock’s Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, was always bound to change some of the slasher franchise’s lore, it is still surprising to see just how the show goes about rewriting the opening scene of the original movie. From the Scream franchise to the recent slasher comedy Totally Killer, there are few slasher movies that don’t owe something to the Friday the 13th franchise.

The original 1980 summer camp slasher might originally have been envisioned as a cheap way to cash in on the success of director John Carpenter’s classic horror Halloween, but the Friday the 13th movies went on to spawn an iconic franchise that eventually rivalled the popularity and pop culture recognizability of the Halloween series. The masked murderer Jason Voorhees became such a mainstream horror icon that the iconic opening scene of Scream saw the killer taunt Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker by reminding her Jason’s mother Pamela was the original movie's killer.

Now, over four decades later, Peacock’s long-awaited prequel series Crystal Lake has shed some light on the backstory of Pamela. The show’s first season explores how Linda Cardellini’s grieving mother ended up killing the summer camp counselors she held responsible for her son’s tragic drowning, but Crystal Lake’s changes to the Friday the 13th franchise also justify Jason’s nigh-on indestructible nature, as well as radically rewriting the opening scene of the entire franchise.

Crystal Lake Completely Changes Friday The 13th's Opening Kill Scene

Matt Infante / ©Peacock/Courtesy Everett Collection

In the opening scene of Friday the 13th, the canoodling camp counselors Barry and Claudette are killed by an unseen murderer when they sojourn to a supply shed for a make-out session. Crystal Lake recreates the opening scene from Friday the 13th, but also rewrites its story, with the twist that the killer’s POV is not that of Pamela.

Instead, it is Jason’s friend Grace who stabs the counselors, and she doesn’t do so for the reason viewers mighty assume. Until now, Pamela was presumed to have killed Barry and Claudette as part of her rampage of revenge against the counselors who ignored Jason’s drowning. However, in Crystal Lake’s story, Grace is tripping on LSD when she attacks and kills Barry, and she seems to think that this will somehow save the long-dead Jason from his fate.

Since it is Pamela who shows up and ends up finishing off Claudette after Grace’s initial attack on her, one could argue that Crystal Lake doesn’t completely rewrite the events of the original movie’s opening scene. However, the next scenes do expand on Friday the 13th’s opening kills dramatically, upping Pamela’s body count and turning her into the cold-blooded killer from the seminal slasher movie.

Crystal Lake Also Expands Friday The 13th's Original Camp Counselor Kills

Credit: Peacock

Crystal Lake gives Barry and Claudette more of a shared character arc, ensuring their deaths hit harder in the series. However, the show also reveals that Pamela soon massacres the assorted hippies trying to reopen the camp shortly after Barry and Claudette’s deaths, since she learns that Grace was high on their drugs when she went after the two counselors.

Thus, while Pamela isn’t technically responsible for the murders of Barry and Claudette, as viewers might have reasonably assumed from the opening scene of Friday the 13th, Crystal Lake’s story changes actually make her overall onscreen body count higher, rather than lower. Pamela justifies the deaths of the hippies to cover up Grace’s crimes and by holding them responsible for her surrogate daughter, Grace, getting a hold of LSD in the first place.

Thus, Crystal Lake both humanizes Barry and Claudette’s killer and, simultaneously, makes Pamela more dangerous than she was in earlier screen incarnations. The changes made to Friday the 13th’s opening scene might not be the biggest canon alternations in the history of the slasher series, but they do allow Crystal Lake to substantially alter the character arc of Jason’s mother.

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  Linda Cardellini

  Pamela Voorhees

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  William Catlett

  Levon Brooks