Crystal Lake: Exploring the Weird Lack of Nudity in Friday the 13th

This article contains spoilers for all of Peacock and A24’s Crystal Lake.

There’s a bare bum but no boobs as far as the eye can see. For kids of the ‘70s and ‘80s, a slasher movie without tits is like a sky without stars. What’s going on?

Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th prequel series produced by A24 and streaming now on Peacock is horror that reflects its time, much in the same way that the 1980 original film did. The show is gory as all hell but fairly prudish when it comes to nudity. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Talking to The Wrap, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane said, “I tried. That’s America. You can give the kids the violence, but God forbid they see some breasts. Sometimes you get overruled in these things.” Pointedly, he does not say exactly who overruled him.

The thing is, the implied moral objection to showing boobs isn’t so different to the ostensible point of the boobs in the first film. Friday the 13th (along with Halloween) is one of the most iconic examples of the sex = death models which gave rise to the Final Girl trope. At Camp Crystal Lake, horny camp counsellors are punished for getting jiggy in the most extreme ways during the OG film series, initially by Pamela Voorhees (played magnificently by Linda Cardellini in the TV show) and later by her unstoppable, possibly supernatural, son Jason Voorhees. By Friday the 13th Part III, not-so-little Jason would become the hockey mask-wearing, machete-wielding icon of horror that he is today.

If you transgress, if you are naughty or sexy, if you party hard, show off your body and aren’t a good girl, then Jason (or his mom) will get you. “Be good, kids! [especially girls!!],” the film is saying with a forked tongue. Sean Cunningham’s original isn’t a PSA though; it’s a willful marriage of heightened senses—the titillation of tits and the shock and adrenaline of extreme violence, which nonetheless comes with an old fashioned moral message—the film is very much having its cake and eating it, so to speak.

In 1980 when the original came out, there wasn’t an internet. There was, however, VHS. Back then, if you were a bog-standard young person, your only viable option to look at naked ladies was an old magazine you found down by some railway tracks or horror movies. This was a genre that was deliberately transgressive and not especially tightly regulated, so while many attribute Psycho and the infamous shower scene to being the forerunner of an association between beautiful, naked women and extreme violence, the VHS era leaned into that hard. It was part of the appeal. It was the unspoken deal: pick out a slasher from your video rental shop and you will get to see some boobs.

Now, however, if a person wants to look at breasts, it’s a mere touch of a button away. Caleb Kane saying “that’s America” is only half right. Peacock (or whoever) can be as censorial as it likes, but pornography has never been more accessible, prevalent, and ubiquitous. Not putting nudity in an extremely violent horror TV show doesn’t do anything for the nation’s moral fibre. It literally makes no difference.

Perhaps, though, it allows the franchise to move away from the very male-centric skew it started out with 46 years ago? If there’s no incentive to hook viewers with the nooky, there’s space to make a show that’s able to explore other angles of slasher mythos and iconography outside of “if you shag, you die.”

Crystal Lake has its work cut out in trying to faithfully follow the events of the original while adding its own new back story.

In the show, as in the original films, Pamela’s son Jason apparently drowns because the camp counselors who should have been watching him are having sex. The camp owners decide to reopen the following year in the series though, causing Pamela much distress. When the camp grounds start getting used again, the bodies begin to really pile up.

However, it’s not just Pamela doing the killing this time. Instead we meet Final Girl 2.0 Grace Snell (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), beautiful, kind, innocent, and the one person who always treated Jason with friendship and compassion. Pamela loves her, she is in no way sexualised, and she doesn’t get killed. Perfect Final Girl material. But in Crystal Lake girls, Final or otherwise, can be more than one thing. And Grace, unfortunately, gets in with the wrong crowd (a bunch of hippies), accidentally takes way too much acid and goes on a killing spree. 

Then there’s Pamela herself. A warm, gentle and loving mother, who (we discover in a stand out flashback episode) had been experimented on by her dastardly husband (Midnight Mass star Hamish Linklater), a fiend whose dodgy employers are attempting to genetically engineer humans in order to survive a nuclear attack. That’s why Jason is deformed; that’s why Jason didn’t drown in the lake (or in an earlier scene where Pamela falls asleep while bathing him); and that’s why Jason goes from being a small boy at camp to a hulking great unstoppable killing machine in a matter of years. 

The purity of the original might have been lost along with its flashes of skin, but what has emerged from under the naked corpses is another beast entirely, and one that’s a bit more nuanced when it comes to the women in the show. So if that’s the price of boobs, it’s probably worth it.