As a slasher series, Friday the 13th is like a chainsaw that took three tugs on the cord to fully fire up. 

Like Scream famously points out, Jason Voorhees, the unstoppable killing machine that the franchise turned into a horror icon, isn’t even the killer in original 1980 film. It’s his mother, Pamela Voorhees. Even though Victor Miller’s unevenly written script doesn’t bother introducing this character before the big reveal, the gleefully deranged performance of actor Betsy Palmer ensures Pamela’s place in horror history.

After we watch a gaggle of camp counselors engage in fairly wholesome sexual activity (strip Monopoly! oh no!) and get slaughtered one by one by an unseen assailant, we learn that Pamela has gone insane and is out to avenge her son’s death from drowning at Camp Crystal Lake decades earlier. The culprits were a couple of neglectful, sexually active teenage camp counselors whom she killed a year after the incident; now, to Pamela, the only good camp counselor is a dead one. No lumbering behemoth in a hockey mask here, just a middle-aged lady with a haircut and sweater that scream “church bake sale,” slaughtering teenagers for “making love while that boy drowned!”

Only in Part 2 does Jason himself, who survived his apparent drowning and has lived in the woods as a feral scavenger ever since, begin his own killing spree. Taking the same zero-tolerance approach to camp counselors as his mother, whose death he’s now out to avenge, he is defeated by yet another sexually active camp counselor, who smartly uses his fixation on his mother to escape certain death.

By Part III, Jason’s a lumbering behemoth with super-strength, seemingly just killing anyone unlucky enough to be near Crystal Lake, where he, uh, didn’t drown. It’s here he gets his trademark hockey mask, grabs his trusty machete, and becomes the monster the series is famous for. It’s also here where the series gets incredibly dumb: toilet humor, central-casting hippies and “punks” as victims, and the worst 3D effects you’ve ever seen. By the time he literally rises from the dead in the fourth film, infamously subtitled The Final Chapter, he might as well be Godzilla, if Godzilla movies had gratuitous nudity and special gore effects by Tom Savini.

Sleazy, silly, and creatively disjointed as they are, though, there’s an arc formed by these initial Fridays — the story of a disabled and bullied boy, a mother driven mad by grief, and an improbable tale of survival that turned the boy into a monster like his mother before him. The heart of it all is an incredible scene at the end of Part 2, in which the film’s “final girl” (Amy Steel) finds Jason’s macabre shrine to his mother (complete with her severed head), puts on her trademark blue sweater, and pretends to be her, cooing at the crazed killer to “come to mommy.” The scene is such a psychosexual live wire, so brilliantly acted by Steel and Palmer, that it feels like it’s from a different, better series. 

Wisely, it’s on this powerful, ultimately lethal relationship between mother and child that Peacock’s Crystal Lake focuses. This prequel/reboot hybrid from creator-writer Brad Caleb Kane, co-showrunner of the excellent, similar It: Welcome to Derry, launches with an entire episode about a mother losing her vulnerable, beloved son before her eyes. It actually takes the emotional stakes of the films’ premise seriously, even as it plants seeds for some of the franchise’s most outlandish elements — and, arguably, gets even more out-there than they did by the end.

I reviewed the series premiere of Crystal Lake — and the Friday the 13th movies too — for Decider, where I’ll be covering the whole show over the next few days. KI KI KI MA MA MA