Crystal Lake showrunner Brad Caleb Kane addressed the question of why the time frame was changed for this prequel by saying, “For TV, I wanted [Pamela’s] grief to be much more immediate and within a nine-month or year span, so you could really understand that grief.” He added, “The movies are not entirely great with the continuity anyway.”
And he’s right. Friday the 13th, as a film series, was never super-attached to its continuity. I mean, Jason was written as drowned in the first movie, but they invented a new backstory in part two because the producers wanted the killer to be Jason (and because his mother’s head wasn’t attached to her body anymore). And don’t even get me started on the continuity shenanigans of Jason Goes to Hell. But I digress.
For me, as a lifelong fan of Friday the 13th, when I found out Crystal Lake would be changing the inciting incident of Jason’s drowning (or perceived drowning) from 1957 to 1971, I simply asked, “why?” I wasn’t mad or anything, I just wanted to know why, specifically, the timeline was changed. Does grief in 1957-58 feel different than grief in 1971-72?
Here’s the full quote of what Brad Caleb Kane told TV Guide, “We talked about maybe setting it in the late ’50s or the early ’60s; all that kind of stuff. For me, it felt like I wanted the grief to be immediate for Pamela. Obviously, the first movie, it’s 20+ years ostensibly after Jason drowned, and she’s still haunting the campgrounds, and she’s still just as raw as she was the day Jason died, and she realized the camp counselors were negligent. For TV, I wanted that grief to be much more immediate and within a nine-month or year span, so you could really understand that grief.”
I still don’t see why it had to be changed. It COULD be changed, and obviously was, and that’s fine, but Pamela feeling grief and murdering a couple of counselors in 1958 versus doing the same thing in 1972 doesn’t feel that different to me. It doesn’t change the immediacy of those acts, which is the “nine-month or year span” Kane is referring to.
Plus, if he’s also saying he wants Pamela’s grief to feel more immediate in relation to the original movie (which is set in 1979), then those acts will be nine years after Jason and the lake, versus 22 years in the original timeline. Yeah, that’s a much longer time, but I feel like it’s just as interesting, or maybe even more interesting, that she would hold on to that rage for more than two decades.
I haven’t seen the entirety of season one yet though. I’m taking it slow because I feel like something is lost when binging all at once. So maybe Kane justifies the decision to change the timeline with the events of the season.
I feel like the biggest reason for the change is because he wanted to incorporate many recognizable characters from the first movie, and it would make less sense for people to stick around for a really long time. Especially if they know that many people in town are being murdered. But in that case, it could be any amount of time and people would probably want to leave, so, yeah. I think Kane just wanted to make something in the ’70s rather than the late ’50s.
And like I said, I’m not mad. It’s totally fine. Crystal Lake is a “spiritual prequel” as Kane told TV Guide, and that’s cool. I just like knowing why changes are made with stuff like this.
