Friday the 13th Series Crystal Lake Is Everything Wrong With Film-to-TV Adaptations

Friday the 13th is proof that a movie need not be a cinematic masterpiece to become a franchise-fueling horror classic. Sean S. Cunningham’s low-budget 1980 film brought the teen-slasher thrills of Halloween to a summer camp preparing to reopen years after two counselors were murdered there. Its plot was skeletal and its performances workmanlike. The attitude it implied toward sex and drugs was as hysterical as any “Just Say No”-era afterschool special. Yet the movie was also viscerally effective, cycling through the sensations of suspense, titillation, and terror so quickly that, for its hormone-addled young audience in particular, it was impossible to look away. Say what you will about Friday the 13th; it’s not boring.So it’s extra disappointing that Crystal Lake, an eight-episode Peacock horror series that reboots the franchise around the mother of victim turned bogeyman Jason Voorhees, is such a slog. Four years in the making, it emerges from a development morass involving the departure of original showrunner Bryan Fuller (who had previously reinvented The Silence of the Lambs franchise in his stylish cult crime drama Hannibal) over creative differences with production company ...