A24’s Friday the 13th Series Must Not Try to Fix the Timeline
Friday the 13th can be elevated, but its timeline needs to stay messy.
It should be the easiest question in the world to answer. When does Friday the 13th take place? On Friday. The thirteenth day of the month. It’s right there in the title. But the Friday the 13th franchise can’t do anything the easy way, so if you thought that a series that took two and a half movies to establish its iconic killer would keep things simple, you thought wrong.
The latest Friday the 13th entry, the A24-produced television series Crystal Lake on Peacock, is a prequel, and prequels always want to straighten things out, providing explanations for things that don’t make sense. But if Crystal Lake “fixes” the timeline, it will take away the spooky campfire feeling of the Friday the 13th franchise.
The First Fridays
Friday the 13th (1980) does in fact take place on Friday, June 13, 1979. That’s the day that a busload of counselors arrive to Camp Crystal Lake, prompting Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) to kill them off to keep the camp closed. The camp closed when Pamela murdered a couple of counselors back in 1958, in revenge for the death by drowning of her son Jason the previous summer, in 1957.
Pamela dies when survivor Alice (Adrienne King) beheads her, before escaping to the middle of a lake in a canoe. Friday the 13th famously ends with a jump scare inspired by Carrie, in which Jason emerges from the lake to attack Alice, but that may be a hallucination. Whatever it was, Alice is found on Saturday, June 14, 1979, and taken to the hospital. In August 1979, Jason finds Alice and kills her with ice pick.
The main part of Part 2 (1981) takes place five years after the first film, with the opening of another camp. The events take place over a couple of days, with no clear indication of which day it is. Part 3 (1982) begins the day that Part 2 ends and spans through the next evening, ending when Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell) seemingly kills Jason in a barn. The fourth film, The Final Chapter (1984), begins the following morning and seems to only take place across a day. Which day? We’re not sure, but even if it’s Friday the 13th, that means Part 2 and Part 3 take place Tuesday the tenth through Thursday the 12th.
And now things really get messy. A New Beginning (1985) jumps ahead another five years to 1989, to find Jason’s killer Tommy Jarvis (played by Corey Feldman in The Final Chapter, now by John Shepherd) in a youth home. The events of the film cover a few days, but we can assume that the main murders—committed by some random ambulance driver named Roy (Dick Wieand), pretending to be Jason—take place on Friday the 13th. The same must be true of the events of Jason Lives! (1986), which occur a year after the previous film, despite the fact that Tommy Jarvis is now played by Thom Mathews.
At the end of Jason Lives!, Tommy and Megan (Jennifer Cooke) trap Jason at the bottom of Crystal Lake. The New Blood (1988) happens seven years later in 1997, when telekinetic Tina Shepard (Lar Park Lincoln) uses her powers to accidentally free Jason, setting him off on a murder rampage. Tina’s powers summon the ghost of her father to drag Jason back to the bottom of the lake. At some point, the anchor from a yacht traveling from Crystal Lake to New York City somehow electrifies Jason’s corpse and brings it back to life. We’re not even sure of the year at this point, but let’s just say it’s 1998, since Jason Takes Manhattan released in 1989.
After the disappointing returns on Jason Takes Manhattan Paramount sold the franchise to New Line Cinema, which means we can finally fix the timeline with a reboot. Right?
New Fridays, Same Problems
Wrong!
New Line Cinema released its first entry in the franchise, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday in 1993—five years before the previous movie takes place. But given that the New Line movies have no overt connections to their predecessors made by Paramount, we could say that Jason Goes to Hell acts as a soft reboot, and that the movie takes place in 1993.
All straightened out, right? Well, no, because Jason X (2002) begins in 2010, with Jason in captivity since 2008, and then jumps ahead to 2455. Do they even have Fridays or the number 13 in the future?
It doesn’t matter, because the last two movies in the franchise take us back to the present. First, Freddy vs. Jason happens in 2003, the same year that it released, and the main action occurs on Friday the 13th. But then comes the 2009 remake, which adds its own trouble. The movie begins on Friday, June 13, 1980, when Pamela Voorhees (now played by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s Nana Visitor) goes on her own killing spree, which ends when she gets beheaded by Alice (Stephanie Rhodes) while young Jason watches. On an undisclosed night in 2009, a grown Jason slaughters a group of campers. Six weeks later, more campers arrive and Jason starts killing them.
As this summary shows, the Friday the 13th series doesn’t have any great allegiance to its titular day. The prequel series Crystal Lake, which stars Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees and Callum Vinson as Jason shouldn’t either, because the series has never been about realism and believability. Throughout the franchise, Jason dies and comes back to life, develops the ability to teleport, and has been a cyborg and a demonic worm. And all of it fits together because of the central premise.
The movies take place at a camp ground. They all have the feeling of scary tales told by a fire—in fact, the movies often use scenes of a campfire tale to fill in the events of previous entries. Campfire tales aren’t about narrative consistency or adherence to a calendar. They’re about shock value. And even though Crystal Lake has a respected star and the A24 brand, it cannot abandon that principle. Let the timeline be messy and let Jason feel like a legend told by campers and counselors who just want to freak each other out.
Crystal Lake streams on Peacock on October 15, 2026.