Shawn Van Horn has been a Senior Features Author for Collider since 2022 with a focus on horror, and 90s TV and movies.
The Big Picture There are only a few horror icons so famous that you don't even have to be a fan of the genre to know who they are. Show a picture of Friday the 13th's hockey-masked killer to just about anyone and chances are they'll be able to tell you it's Jason Voorhees. Jason ruled the 1980s, with a movie coming out nearly every year, but by the '90s, as the franchise moved from Paramount to New Line Cinema, Jason stalked Camp Crystal Lake less and less.
The lawsuit came to an end in 2021, and just one year later came the announcement, not of a new movie , but of an interesting second-best option: a TV series. With the creative geniuses at A24 behind it, and Bryan Fuller, the producer of Hannibal, running it, and distribution set for Peacock, there was potential for the series known as Crystal Lake.
What had gone so wrong on Crystal Lake all of a sudden? Crew members told The Wrap that the series "was plagued by inexperienced production executives making questionable decisions, problems with the show’s writing staff and conflicts between showrunners and executives," while studio execs blamed Fuller and Gray for the problems. One A24 source called them "complicated people.
Crystal Lake shouldn't have been so difficult to figure out. This isn't Star Wars or Lord of the Rings with a deep mythology to work around and intricate special effects to create. Friday the 13th is as simple as it gets, with a guy in a hockey mask, and before that, his mommy, hacking up horny teenagers at a summer camp. Fans aren't tuning in for well-written origin story and Emmy Award-winning plots.
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