The most famous sweater in slasher history has turned up on a new set of shoulders. Costume designer Cristina Spiridakis shared the first image of Linda Cardellini wearing Pamela Voorhees’ blue cable-knit sweater in Crystal Lake, crediting a feature on the show’s costumes in the current issue of Emmy Magazine. A24 and Peacock’s Friday the 13th prequel drops all eight episodes on Thursday, October 15.
It is a small piece of wardrobe and an enormous piece of continuity. In Sean Cunningham’s 1980 film, that sweater arrives in the final act on a woman nobody in the audience has met, and it has been shorthand for the character ever since. Putting it on Cardellini years earlier is the clearest signal yet of how the series intends to use its own mythology.
Hiding in plain sight
Spiridakis laid out the thinking behind Pamela’s wardrobe plainly. “It is important that Pam is hiding in plain sight,” she said of the character’s look. “So, we keep her in a color story of maroons, browns, mustards, and rich eggplant, along with grounded silhouettes.”
That is a costume department describing a whodunit. The original film withheld its killer for eighty minutes and let a pleasant, unremarkable woman walk into the last reel. A palette built out of muted 1970s earth tones does the same job across eight hours, and the sweater is the one item in it the audience already knows how to read.
Spiridakis also thanked “the artists and craftspeople that helped us build the world” in the post, which is the kind of line that tends to accompany a show confident enough to start showing its work five weeks out.
What Betsy Palmer left behind
Pamela Voorhees was written by Victor Miller, who died on September 2 at 86, and played by Betsy Palmer, a working television actress who took the job because she needed a car and assumed nobody would ever see the movie. She called the script dreck and expected it to vanish. It grossed just under $60 million against a budget of roughly $550,000, and the performance she gave in roughly fifteen minutes of screen time has outlasted almost everything else in her filmography.
The franchise then spent four decades handing the camera to her son. Pamela returns as a severed head, a flashback, a hallucination, a voice. Crystal Lake is the first project in the series to treat her as a person with a life before the last act, and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, who came to the series from It: Welcome to Derry, has framed the show as a character piece about her unraveling.
Five weeks out
The series picks up roughly a year after young Jason drowns in the lake, with two strangers arriving in town to ask questions about Pam’s past. Callum Vinson plays Jason. The cast around them includes William Catlett as Levon Brooks, Devin Kessler as Briana Brooks, Cameron Scoggins as Dorf, Gwendolyn Sundstrom as Grace Snell, and Nick Cordileone as Crazy Ralph, a role that has never once brought good news to anybody.
What nobody outside the production knows yet is how the show handles the ending everyone already owns. The sweater is on screen. The machete is a matter of time. Crystal Lake premieres Thursday, October 15, on Peacock.
